Midterm Crunch!

Basophil (left) and eosinophil (right)

We are in the midst of midterms! Our weekends are going to be filled with studying for advanced organic chemistry on monday, clinical pharmacy on wednesday, and then turning in a draft for our ethics paper on thursday.

Today, we just finished our histology midterm in ANAT115. It is fair to say that we have been spending the past few days memorizing pictures of tissues and cells from lecture slides. For someone like me who has never taken anatomy, only anatomy lab, I did actually learn something about how to differentiate between an eosinophil and a basophil. I did not know the different types of connective tissue in the body before either. For example, type IV collagen predominates in the meshlike structure known as the basal lamina which underlies all epithelial cells. I think I forced myself to know the molecular structures in hyaline cartilage such as type II collagen fibers bound to other fibers by perpendicular strands of proteoglycans and parallel strands of hyaluronic acid. And if you zoom in on a collagen fiber, you can differentiate how filaments are bound together by chondroitin sulfate.

The reason why this applies to pharmacy is that I notice customers asking about glucosamine, hyaluronic acid, and shark cartilige (chondroitin sulfate) supplements. Since these are over the counter, it is important for pharmacists to know why manufacturers are claiming that these supplements strengthen cartilige. The reasoning is that if you take in dietary components of cartilige, you will be able to regenerate your cartilige. This claim is not particularly substantiated by anatomists since the human body cannot regenerate cartilige once it is damaged because there are no blood vessels that innervate cartilige. A blood supply is necessary to bring nutrients and mesenchymal cells that can differentiate into chondroblasts which can synthesize cartilige.

Bone, on the other hand, is richly innervated with blood vessels, which is the reason why bone can regenerate after a fracture while cartilige cannot. That is why pharmacists advocate taking calcium supplements especially while your body is healing from a bone breakage. Daily calcium intake is mainly for preventing osteoporosis since cells such as osteoclasts actively dissolve bone to maintain a rigid blood calcium level.

My main complaint about the class is that it is not as interactive as a lab class where we can look at samples on microscope slides.

A growing number of students are becoming increasingly unsatisfied about the assessment lectures that we have had in CP112 because they are not directly applicable to most of our internship experiences in the retail, compounding, or hospital outpatient pharmacy settings.

In my opinion, the problem is that Dr. Ron Finley specializes in geriatrics and even though he is a pharmacist, he can only give us advice about how to diagnose alzheimer's or hypertension (blood pressure monitoring). He does not know much about general prescription and over the counter drugs like what we are actually being tested on: opthalmics, pressurized metered dose inhalers and other asthma/COPD Rx drugs, and upper respiratory infections. So we have all these guest lecturers come to teach these areas. The disparity lies between the objectives laid out by the guest lecturers and what he expects us to get out of the class. He neither confirms nor denies the details (the age at which is appropriate for kids to use eye drops). He ultimately writes the tests, so we are which will come from our giant OTC book. It seems that we will have to memorize like the adult and pediatric dosages for 20 drugs covered throughout the quarter in addition to the 60 drugs that we are expected to know the therapeutic class, brand/generic name, indications, and schedule. Hopefully, I have adapted to this kind of class, which has a different schedule every week depending on whether they have arranged workshops, lecturers, conferences, field trips, etc.

But I hope there is a method to this madness.

There is an exciting event going on tonight which is the Red dress fashion show and raffle in the Milberry Union Gym to benefit the American Heart Association. A lot of Pharmacy 1's are donning designer dresses and walking down the catwalk holding informative statistics about Heart disease. More on this in the synapse to come...