Mexico Medical Student |

I don’t know why I didn’t see this sooner, but Dr. Nick Genes (of Grand Rounds fame) wrote an original piece on Medscape about the value of blogging during medical school. To quote a portion:

But perhaps even more important is that medical student blogs are useful for students themselves. It’s therapeutic to record your feelings, to vent frustrations, and to register difficult experiences. This is the kind of activity that makes for a sensitive and caring doctor — probably the kind of doctor that most beginning students expect to be but forget about somewhere along the line. Blogging can help students remember. It’s also instructive because it allows us to chart our progress through the years. On those bleak days of surgery clerkship, it may be encouraging to look back and see how far you’ve come since the first squeamish posts about anatomy lab.

Finally, blogging can create opportunities and open up frontiers. Beyond the simple scenarios that have helped me — such as getting the inside scoop on hospitals during residency interview season — getting involved with the nascent medical blogosphere can help you sift through the Web’s educational resources (such as a collection of clinical cases and archived school lectures). It also can inspire student activism or show you what life is like in foreign med schools. Blogging might even open up doors into research.

That “foreign med schools” pseudo-link you see there would have had you arrive here, but it’s live on the real article, so thanks Dr. Nick for the link! Also, thanks for a great article. The “therapeutic” value of blogging is pretty obvious, especially for med students, professionals, or anyone else in a demanding, stressful field, but the more insightful commentary is about the connections one makes. Speaking personally, I have joined a community of medbloggers that I truly feel give far more to me than I give to them, and through them I learn about so many things every day. As students, it’s important to put down the textbooks for a while and soak in knowledge and experience directly at face value, not as merely the sum of a collection of finite, discrete processes. The sum of the parts is sometimes less than the whole. Every blogger represented in my sidebar and many others I have yet to discover has his/her own unique story to tell, and through them, I am enriched beyond my own experiences.