At UVa, a 7-week journey into medicine

After turning to the first page of the day’s handout, the class of 139 students gazed down at Barry Hinton. The University of Virginia professor was about to change the way they expressed direction.

“You’re in medical school now,” Hinton said. “We don’t say up or down. We say superior and inferior.”

The students scanned the anatomy basics sheet. Front was anterior, back was posterior, prone was lying face down and supine was lying face up.

“Supine has up in it,” Hinton told the class. “Medical students taught me that.”

This class may have been sitting in the first-year medical school classroom using handouts given to new students, but none had needed to take the MCAT. They were community members enrolled in Mini-Med School, a seven-week medical education program offered for free to the community at large. The program is so popular that several hundred people apply a year, far more than the volunteer-run program can handle.

The program came to UVa in 1995 after Jerry Short read an article about a similar program in Washington. The associate dean for medical education did some research before adapting the program for UVa.

“Most mini med schools emphasize the disease of the day,” Short said. “In ours, we try to teach the basic sciences and what medical school students learn.”

UVa’s Mini-Med School attracts everyone from high school students with an interest in studying medicine to older couples looking for something new to learn. Some university students attend the two-hour weekly sessions, too.

“It’s a good rehash,” said Tifani Jones, a third-year UVa law student who was pre-med as an undergrad. “I think it actually appeals on all levels.”

Hinton clicked to the next slide in his PowerPoint presentation. Onscreen was a long blob-like inner ear hair cell under the greenish tint. Hinton hit play, and the cell began to bob to the music.

“One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock,” burst from the speakers.

The class laughed.

“You can dance if you wish,” said Hinton, smiling at the laughing crowd. “Isn’t science fun?”

Unlike the college experience some students had when they were in school, Mini-Med School relies on a mix of lecture, PowerPoint slides and live demonstrations. At the start of the seven-week program, each student is issued a binder to hold packets of notes handed out each week with the help of Short’s wife, Zan. Short said he has been inspired to run Mini-Med School by her involvement in The Party Parade Fund, which supports local charities.

“This is something I could do for the community,” Short said. “Not being a doctor, I am fascinated by what people know and what people need to know about their health.”

Mini-Med School aims to get the message across in the most interesting way possible. While many television shows depict surgeries and the human innards, there is nothing like seeing them in the flesh. On the first night of Mini-Med School, first-year medical student Sunhee Park showed the class her larynx.

Park, whose nose had been anesthetized prior to the demonstration, hopped up on the black lab table in front of the classroom. A doctor slipped a flexible fiber optic cable up her nose, working it through her body until the scope settled just above her larynx. Park’s larynx moved comically as she coughed, made noises and sang “Happy Birthday,” much to the delight and the disgust of the class.

At the second to last session, Mini-Med School students were split into 13 small groups to visit laboratories across UVa. Students signed up in advance for the lab tours, which covered everything from bacterial toxins to gene therapy.

In Dr. Adam Katz’s “Waist Not, Want Not” lab, students got the chance to see fat stem cells under the microscope and try microsurgery under an operating microscope. Katz explained he has had eight years of training in the surgery technique, which uses tiny curved needles and sutures that can close the smallest of cuts on a mouse. The university’s plastic surgeons need regular practice in the intricate technique.

However, that doesn’t mean it took long for novice Karen Kopek to coordinate both hands to push the needle and pull it through a small patch of skin-like material.

“Did you see that,” said Kopek, who was still holding the needle and “pickups.” “Did you see that?”

A medical education

Unlike real medical school students, Mini-Med School participants need only attend five of seven two-hour sessions to “graduate.” However, they are taught the same subjects as enrolled students. Park said Hinton’s anatomy class was “very much of a brief overview” of what she has been studying this year, except the Mini-Med students don’t have endless lists of vocabulary to memorize.

Rather than interning at a hospital to work with patients, Mini-Med School students got a chance to sit in and contribute to an interview of a hypertension sufferer. Regina Bull told the class about how her high blood pressure affected other aspects of her life. Students seemed surprised when Bull said she had never smoked, rarely drank and consumed a moderate amount of caffeine.

Part of Mini-Med School is about breaking medical misconceptions. Katz, who studies adult stem cells found in fat, said the cells aren’t the cure-all that the media has touted. The plastic surgeon said the cells can turn into many other types of cells, but science hasn’t figured out exactly how to control them.

Dr. Diane G. Snustad, who presented the session on aging, seemed to surprise many students when she discussed the only “normal” signs of aging. Older people should expect to have wrinkles, gray hair, some hearing loss and a decrease in their heart rate.

Snustad said older people shouldn’t expect to be ill.

“To be old is not to be sick,” Snustad read from a slide. “What happens is people think they are slowing down.”

Graduation

Students are given evaluation forms to fill out for each part of Mini-Med School. Short said it’s hard to please everyone, as some people always think the sessions are too easy and some think they are too hard.

He said he has no plans to add more Mini-Med School sessions or increase the class size, as the formula developed more than a decade ago is still working well today.

Although there are no final exams, there is a certain sense of accomplishment that accompanies finishing seven weeks of Mini-Med School. With her arms flying up to her shoulders, student Carol Mitchell descended the steps in front of the class to get her certificate.

“Yay!” she exclaimed, prompting laughter from her fellow graduates. Like the hundreds of students before her, Mitchell arrived at the front of the class and shook Short’s hand.