MBBS Finals 2022 - The End is Near

It is Nov 22, a few more weeks to your MBBS finals. You have already amassed a vast amount of knowledge and hopefully, clinical experience, in the past 10 months or so since your Year 5 program started and soon, all those will be put to the test.

It is even more important now to consolidate your learnings and begin to filter those extra knowledge from those essential knowledge. Take note that not everything you have learned in your daily clinical exposure will be tested in the finals. Understandably so because the spectrum of coverage for everything in medicine is so broad and there is only so much time allocated for each student during the examinations.

This is the time when the study list handed out by your faculty at the start of Year 5 will be most valuable. Use that as a guide for your revision. Narrow down your focus to make revision more effective. Time is of the essence. You wont have time to digest and absorb the entire Harrison’s or Guyton’s medical textbooks.

And with all that knowledge on hand (in brain, actually), it is also equally important to know how to apply those on the exam day itself when faced with the patient in the examination room.

For those who are easily anxious, it would be good to learn relaxation techniques to keep your mind clear. Drawing a comparison with our recently concluded GE15 on Nov 19, 2022 which resulted in a hung parliament, you wont want to have a hung mind during the exam day. Keep your nervousness in check, stay focused with a clear mind, speak the right things (and not everything you see), and god willing (regardless whether you are religious or an atheist, you need some amount of divine blessing during the finals) you will clear the finals and graduate.

Over the next few weeks prior to the final exam date, I will find time to post summaries of approaches to the short case examinations for the major medical station systems and hopefully some spot diagnoses cases.

Do read on and make this blog your revision companion.

All the best.

 

CCE.

Tendon Xanthomas

Dear students,

Sharing with you a case I encountered in the cardiology ward some years ago. It was a case of a young patient in her 20s. She suffered an extensive myocardial infarction few months before I met her in the cardiology ward. She was admitted for coronary angioplasty plus stenting.

She had several siblings who were all myocardial infarction survivors and if I recall correctly, her parents were also cardiovascular patients. She has familial hyperlipidemia. 

I recalled her blood lipid levels were shockingly high and blood samples were very lipemic (oily). She was already on several high dose statins and fibrates. My colleagues in the cardiology team were even discussing plans for a lipid dialysis as they were desperately trying to solve her resistantly high blood lipid levels. The challenge was that the treatment was very limited and only very few centres were offering such treatment options, not to mention the high cost of such treatment as well. 

Below are pictures of tendon xanthomas found on the patient.

For those who have yet to see tendon xanthomas, the above photos depict how one looks like. Good luck.

CCE.