Dear Reader,
Welcome to the Cambridge Widening Access to Medicine Society monthly newsletter 😊. We hope you have had a great start to the new academic year! In this month's newsletter, we will be exploring how to tackle questions that involve talking about your biggest weakness, why it is not true that not being the smartest person in your cohort will mean you will be a terrible doctor., why women's health outcomes seem to be worse than men and the website 'Medic Mind'. Food for Thought: an example interview question What is your biggest weakness? Yasmin. our university outreach officer, explores how to tackle this question here. Myth-buster Myth: You will no longer be the smartest person in your cohort and how smart you determines how good you will be as a doctor. Cory, one of our graduate officers, explores why this is not the case. One thing everybody will tell you about coming to Cambridge is that you feel like you are no longer the smartest person in the room. The truth is, while this is probably true, does it determine how good a doctor you will be? Absolutely not. Although this can be intimidating when you start medical school, it should not discourage you from your studies. Medical school is a great leveller, meaning that by the end of the course everyone will have been trained to the same standard. Exams are important, both to test your knowledge and for your foundation year ranking. However, they are not the be-all and end-all. Focus should be put on developing or building upon the key characteristics of being a good doctor alongside having a sound understanding of the processes, which underpin many of the conditions you will be managing in your future patients. Being in an environment where your peers are intelligent and hardworking can be challenging but also rewarding. Medical students tend to be quite competitive, which can cause undue stress and make the experience of your course less enjoyable (depending on your personality). On the other hand, this type of environment, in the right setting, can be a fantastic way to keep yourself motivated throughout the course and to improve your learning experience. There are some things you can do if you want to feel more prepared before starting. Covering the basics of topics such as anatomy and physiology are great places to start due to their depth, especially anatomy as it is something rarely covered at A-level. Having some level of exposure to the field before starting lectures will be far less overwhelming than hearing it all for the first time on your first day. Behind the Headlines Safa explains why health outcomes are so different for men and women, the reason for this bias and whether there is a solution.
The differences between women’s and men’s attitudes towards their health have been well studied and recognised. Women are more likely to utilise healthcare services than men and are also 50% more likely to receive a wrong initial diagnosis. Such mistakes are especially fatal in the case of cardiac illnesses such as heart attacks. This article explores the possible reasons why women with heart disease are more likely to be misdiagnosed and less likely to be treated or discharged quickly.
Reason 1 - Heart attack rates are lower in younger women than younger men, so symptoms are more likely to be dismissed.
Reason 2 - Women’s symptoms of heart diseases are more unpredictable
This article dismisses both of these reasons as heart attacks are not a rare occurrence in hospitals, even for women, so doctors must still be well experienced in diagnosing them. Moreover, symptoms of heart attacks are broadly similar in men and women, with a few exceptions, so this should not be causing such huge differences in diagnoses.
Reason 3 - Interestingly, many studies that show such strong differences in health outcomes for men and women also reveal that these differences in outcomes were only seen when the doctor is male! A study on physician gender and treatment showed that women had much higher rates of survival when treated by another woman. This brings us to wonder whether this is because male doctors perceive more traditionally feminine characteristics in women to be more dramatic, hysterical, or overblown — hence more likely to dismiss women’s symptoms.
One obvious solution to this is to have a more gender-balanced team in hospitals. However, this is appearing to be more difficult in cardiology, which is seen as a traditionally male field, perhaps due to the use of complex devices inserted into the heart, which attracts more men to the occupation. There have been many attempts to promote women in cardiology, however, this has not led to sufficient results. ‘In the US, more than 50% of medical school students are women but this figure drops to only 4.5% for the practising “interventional” cardiologists (the ones using catheters to treat heart attacks)’
Another exciting and promising solution is the use of data science and AI to create an algorithm that can detect heart attacks with high accuracy, therefore helping to level the field between men and women. You can read more about that here https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-archive/2022/august/artificial-intelligence-could-help-narrow-heart-attack-gender-gap Link of the Month Pravinija, our secretary, shares a resource that she feels helped demystify the medicine application process for her. Medic Mind https://www.medicmind.co.uk/medicine-ucas-guide/topic/medicine-interview-guides/ If you know very few people or nobody at all who has gone through the journey of completing a medical application, the process can be very daunting and in times like this, it is very useful to have some explaining to you why some things work the way they do which is what 'Medic Mind achieves. When starting a medical application, one of the first things to consider is which universities you would like to apply and to answer this question, you may need to take into account a lot of factors such as whether the university considers UCAT or BMAT, the grades requires or whether they offer an intercalated degree and this can be very overwhelming. However, 'Medic Mind' offers a very useful comparison tool which can help narrow down the list of universities you may be interested in and provide a starting point for your research into which unis you feel you want to apply to. Medic Mind is a hub of resources for UCAT, BMAT and interviews which explain the various processes but also provides free question banks and most impressively, provides these resources in the online format which will be very useful in giving you the experience of seeing these questions on the screen and working through them since at school, most of us are used to working on paper. Additionally, Medic Mind has pages containing example interview questions from many universities such as Kings College London, Cardiff and Exeter exploring the interview style, topics commonly discussed in interviews and MI stations if applicable. That's the end of the newsletter this month and if you have any questions, then as ever, please just email us at questions@camwams.co.uk! We hope you have had a great start to the new academic year and good luck to all those submitting university applications! Love, CamWAMS 2022 Committee
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