One of the things that you quickly learn as an osteopathic medical student is that there is never enough time in OMT lab to practice all of the techniques. In our DOCS lab, we typically have 80ish students (e.g., half the class) in lab and the two hours are broken up into four 25-minute stations with a 10 minute *lecture* at the outset (I use asterisks around the word ‘lecture’ because UIWSOM does not utilize lectures in the traditional sense of the word. We use a lot of flipped classroom modalities / Socratic delivery of material. Not good or bad, how you feel about this method of information delivery is really about personal preferences…)
Some of the OMT faculty are very good at demonstrating the techniques and others not so much. Further, as I have seen other DO students and graduates complain about, I am finding that there are not a lot of really good OMT resources out there. Finally, because there are so many students in class, the faculty can’t get around to everyone to answer questions or correct mistakes in our technique.
So, my wife surprised me with a massage bed (like the OMT tables in lab in most respects) so that I can practice at home. She has a few long-standing low back and gluteal somatic dysfunctions, so she’ll benefit from my practice and of course, I’ll benefit by being better prepared for the DOCS exams as well as my COMLEX exams in a few years. I’ll also get to practice my patient interviewing and examination skills.
So, what I did to prepare for the last DOCS exam was have my wife lay across the bed while I pulled up a video of say, diagnosing lumbar somatic dysfunction, and I performed the steps on my wife as I watched the video. I’d stop the video now and again to take notes; I got through all of the OMT videos and the Bates patient exam videos two nights before the exam and I actually felt prepared for those two finals (Other good sources for OMT and patient history and physical videos are Lecturio and Osmosis). This time, I’ve got almost two full weeks to go over all the OMT and patient history/physical & SOAP note material from this block, starting tonight. I’ll close by saying that its an AMAZING blessing to have a spouse/partner who is as vested in your success as you are.
P.S.- As you can see, Thor has claimed the table as his own. When I set it up, Loki decided that it was something to be scared of so he went and hid under the couch…
