Featured Course
2008 Spring Term (2084)
Pathology: The Study of Disease (MED 2125)
Instructor:
Lwwrence Nichols
Course description:
Note: Registration for this course requires Pre-approval from the instructor obtained in a personal interview.
The course introduces pre-medicine students to the foreign language of the terminology of disease, which reduces the extreme burden of simultaneously learning this language and using it to learn the diseases in the first year of medical school. The course also introduces pre-medicine students to all the most common and most important diseases of humans as well as general concepts of disease, the first pass of many in their lifelong medical education. This introduction will integrate the pathology of each disease (the way it appears visually, especially under a microscope) with the epidemiology, the symptoms, the signs, the laboratory test manifestations, the pathophysiology, the treatment and the prognosis in an understanding of the disease. The students’ learning will be aided and enlivened by stories, which previous classes have found exceedingly memorable and helpful in remembering the diseases and concepts.
Two chapters (approximately 100 pages) of the largest and best comprehensive textbook of pathology will be assigned reading each week and the students will be expected to have used the internet, the library, the dictionary and whatever textbooks of anatomy, histology, physiology and medicine necessary to understand it in preparation for class.
Each class will be an interactive question, answer and discussion session. The students will be encouraged to ask the teacher about anything they need help understanding or simply want to know more about, and the teacher will then use the Socratic method, asking them questions on the assumption they know and understand everything they have not asked about, to make certain they understood the essential points. It can be very embarrassing for a student who does not know or understand something to have this revealed in front of all the other students.
The course will meet twice weekly from 6:00 to 8:00 PM on Mondays and Thursdays in room 349A Scaife Hall. Each Monday, the students will take a 3-minute timed quiz handwriting the definitions of 3 concepts or diseases. Each Thursday they will take ten minutes to handwrite an essay on the most fundamental features of a disease or concept in pathology. This will incidentally provide practice in some skills essential for most practicing physicians. The terms and diseases to be tested will be drawn from lists provided to the students the previous week.
This course is designed for students already accepted into medical school (or in the application process with good prospects) who have a lot of time in the spring semester and are willing to spend that time in an extreme effort to not only prepare for medical school, but start learning what they need to know to be doctors, in fact, a lot of what they need to know to be doctors, and not just doctors, but excellent ones. Giving this course requires an extreme effort on the teacher’s part and he wants this effort to yield the highest possible benefit for future patients. He doesn’t want students who only have or are willing to give 8-12 hours/week for this course. He wants students who can and will give 20-30 hours/week.
This course is essentially boot camp for medical school. The medical school education, medical school grades and licensing board scores of the physician teaching this course benefited greatly from courses in anatomy, physiology and microbiology which he took in the spring term immediately before medical school and this course will give University of Pittsburgh pre-medicine students a similar advantage.
This will be the fourth time this course is given. Evaluations by previous takers are on the website ratemyprofessors.com. The course has been revised in many respects to improve it, based on the experience of the first 3 runs, but it remains experimental. An experiment last time was to have some of the tests be group tests, giving the whole class 15 minutes to put their heads together and make a diagnosis and best alternative diagnosis, with every student sharing the same grade for the test, practicing the cooperation essential to being a good physician instead of the competition essential to getting into medical school. This experiment will probably be repeated. The course is not available to audit or take pass/fail. The course is un-recommended for students struggling to get into med school. The course has had some students who fail to get into medical school and as the semester wears on, these students have become increasingly depressed and unable to participate in the course, which is a severe problem for everyone in the course. Instead of accepting students into the course, first come, first served, as in the past, because there are so many more students who want the course than can have it, this year, interviews will be granted until Thursday, October 25, and then 10 students will be selected and a waiting list composed for the rest. Students will be selected on the basis of how much they are in a position to benefit from the course.
Students who may be interested in the course
Pre-medicine students
Evaluation
The student grades will be based entirely on the definition and essay tests. 70% of the grade will be from a weekly ten-minute in-class essay test on a disease (or concept of disease) and 30% from the three one-minute definitions of terms, all handwritten. In order to balance out any potential biases in the inevitably subjective grading of the tests, a second pathologist will independently grade all of the tests and each student’s final grade will be the 50:50 average of the grades given by the teacher and the independent grader.
Prerequisites
There are no absolute prerequisite courses, but it is an Honors Course, which requires a 3.25 GPA. A prior course in anatomy and physiology is highly recommended, but is not an absolute prerequisite. This course is designed for second-semester seniors and the more anatomy, histology, physiology and medicine the students know, the more they will be able to get out of the course.
Texts
Robbins Pathologic Basis of Disease, seventh edition, 2004.
Class size
Maximum of 10 students
About the instructor
Larry Nichols is an absolute curmudgeon. In his efforts to make what he teaches memorable, he sometimes inadvertently offends some of his students. He was once called the tactless wonder of the western world. No student faint of heart should take a course from him. Embarrassment is the most powerful memory aid there is and no student unwilling to have this most powerful of learning tools used in his/her education should take a course from Nichols. His goal is to create such strong memories of particular diseases that if it is 10 or 20 years before his students encounter a case of it, they will remember enough to make the diagnosis.
Nichols has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy in addition to his M.D degree. He has worked as a shoe salesman, hotel desk clerk, busboy, dishwasher, security guard, hotel night auditor, clothing salesman and high school teacher in addition to as a physician. He once had a job doing autopsies of AIDS patients for all of Los Angeles County. He has lived in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, North Carolina, California and England. He has one child, a son adopted from Calcutta, India. He brings a great deal of life experience to his teaching.
Nichols has been the chief of the autopsy service for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center since 1992. His specialties are the pathology of infectious diseases, the pathology of the heart and autopsy pathology.
Practical Matters
Interested students must contact Dr. Nichols to arrange the personal interview and to get the information needed to take the course. Nichols can be contacted by electronic mail (at Nicholsla@upmc.edu), by calling his office (412-647-3936) or by paging him (calling 412-392-7376 and then entering the telephone number for him to call back to).