With microbiology completed, we’ve moved onto the cardiopulmonary system. I find that cardiopulmonary is way more intuitive than microbiology. If you have a basic understanding of physics, it’s relatively easy to understand what is going on during heart failure, shock, and other forms of cardiac dysfunction. A conceptual foundation in circuits allows for quick comprehension of vascular distribution, vascular flow and vascular resistance. Furthermore, if there’s some sort of pathology, it becomes easier to predict the body’s compensatory changes.
On the other hand, in microbiology, a patient arrives with relatively non-specific symptoms and it’s up to you to figure out the pathogen! Often, it can be narrowed down to a few bugs and sometimes it doesn’t even matter because you’d treat the patient with broad spectrum antibiotics anyway. I personally found this to be frustrating. For me, there was no way to logic through problems; I just had to memorize a hodge-podge of symptoms associated with specific pathogens. Sometimes the symptoms were able to be explained by molecular actions of toxins, other times you had to accept it for what it was. I’m not saying that microbiology is unimportant: in fact, it is a vital subject for all physicians. I just found the nature of the subject to be completely unintuitive. I liken it to the anatomy block: there’s no logical basis to most of the subject and you just have to cram it into to your head and hope that with enough repetition the structures become second nature.
