Patient and Doctor

Hello. I've just got back from a PBL tutorial and have been out all day. After the first lecture of the morning we had an immunology practical. We had to count lymphocytes in helathy and abnormal blood samples and work out percentages of helper and killer cells by looking at whether antibodies labelled with beads bound to specific proteins on their surface. We then had several examples of results from other patients to answer questions on. After that we had another lecture on adapted immunity, followed by Patient and Doctor.

The Patient and Doctor course is a series of sessions where we meet up in college groups with a doctor who usually brings along one or two patients with conditions that are relevent to what we are learning about at that time. Today, however, the session was about consent and we didn't have a patient to question but the doctor was a specialist in medicolegal issues. He gave a presentation on consent and used an interactive computer programme to give examples of situations where consent is difficult. He also gave us chocolate coins to demonstrate the problems involved in selling treatments!

This evening's tutorial was about salmonella and classification of bacteria. Since it was a PBL I now have some specific areas to research before the next part of the tutorial on Friday.