Before the OR, students get more anatomy practice

“You need to be at a 45- to 50-degree angle,” observes Charles Prestigiacomo, MD, professor of neurological surgery, as he walks towards the duo in the Goodyear Lab in the CARE/Crawley Building. “You’re at a 95- to 100-degree angle here. You want to be oriented the same way you would be if you were performing surgery. A patient would never be in this position on the operating table.”

This is the reason Prestigiacomo created the Advanced Anatomy of the Head and Neck elective, offered to fourth-year students at the college who are getting ready to match in surgical residencies and begin performing procedures on patients. He and colleagues are seeing how this class is better preparing students to begin their careers with a little more “real-life” practice.

“As a medical student, I always felt that gross anatomy was something that we needed to learn early but was offered too soon to benefit from the vast amounts of knowledge it provided,” he says. “You’re being taught so much as a first-year student; while it is important to see all the parts and systems of the body, in the gross anatomy lab, everything is opened up and completely visible and accessible, which is not how it actually is in the body when you’re doing surgery. You need to learn how to maneuver and access areas I call ‘corridors’ without causing damage to other parts of the body. You have to make the smallest footprint possible.

“I tell my students that this is like the vocabulary of medicine and physiology is grammar. We need to make sure it is structured properly to ‘communicate,’ or function, best. These students already have a passion, but we’re just helping them become more precise, gentler — more poetic versus prosaic.”

Diana Le, a self-described “Southern California girl,” says she fell in love with neuroscience early, and after graduating from UCLA with a neuroscience degree, went on to get her master’s degree in physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University, eventually making her way to the UC College of Medicine.

She matched early, in February, into the neurological surgery residency program at Baylor University in Houston, Texas. 

“As a recipient of the Health Professions Scholarship Program, I'll be fulfilling my service obligation to the military as a neurosurgeon of the U.S. Navy after the seven-year residency,” she says. “After that, who knows?”

But before heading south, Le made sure she made time in her schedule for this course, rearranging classes just so that she could get this extra training.

“Overall, this is hands down the best course that I have ever taken,” she says. “It combines gross anatomy, history and surgical anatomy using the best resources that the UC College of Medicine has to offer. One of the most progressive aspects of the course is an emphasis on understanding rather than memorization, and on learning for the sake of learning, rather than for quizzes and exams."