We move on to Short Postings! These are two-week postings where we rotate in specialties that are distinct from Internal Medicine or Surgery.
👩🏻⚕️ What Infectious Diseases Clinical Posting is Like
In general, for Infectious Diseases (ID) posting, we have a mix of ward rounds, clinics, and tutorials.
Ward rounds are pretty much similar to Internal Medicine rounds. Clinics are also standard. Probably the only unique thing is that there is a HIV clinic in ID. However, Venereology—the management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs)—is actually mainly under Dermatology.
👍🏼 What Was Great About Infectious Diseases Posting
- Broad internal medicine knowledge. I feel like ID is quite broad in the sense that you do need to have a certain knowledge of all systems (cardio, respi, neuro, etc), since infection can affect any of these systems in the body. This makes ID a surprisingly ‘general’ specialty, and after the first day of ward rounds, I began to see some of the allure of ID/General Medicine.
- Bedside tutorials. In ID posting, we actually didn’t get much chance to examine patients. But at least we did have one bedside tutorial, where we saw a patient with HIV. (FYI, bedside tutorials are not actual sit-down tutorials. Instead, we clerk patients with a doctor assigned as our clinical tutor. This helps a lot in our learning as the tutor would observe us and give feedback.)
👎🏼 What Was Not-So-Great About Infectious Diseases Posting
- Not that exciting. For me, ID posting was the most boring out of all the rotations we did this year. Please note that this is a highly subjective opinion. Firstly, I’ve already done Internal Medicine posting, and had the chance to see patients with infectious diseases in General Medicine and on the IM wards. Additionally, ID is not my particular area of interest. I’d imagine if someone was really passionate about ID, they’d still be hyped no matter how mundane the clinical posting itself might be.
- Mind-boggling memorisation. Pathogens (bacteria, viruses, and fungi) as well as the antimicrobials used to treat infectious diseases may not make inherent sense. All you can do is to just commit facts to memory. This is not really a ‘lowlight’ or a bad thing. And if you’re someone who’s into ID you might even enjoy it.
📝 Impressions of Infectious Diseases as a Specialty
Beyond what we already know about ID (having to memorise antibiotic regimes and be familiar with a myriad microorganisms), one thing stood out to me in this ID posting: perhaps ID shares some of the allure of General Medicine.
As mentioned above, it’s imperative that ID physicians have a certain breadth of Internal Medicine knowledge. The patients that they see may also have various comorbidities that have to be managed together with the infectious disease.
During the ID posting, I was somewhat drawn towards this aspect of ‘general’ medicine. If we choose to go down a specialised path after medical school (think stuff like Neurosurgery, Ophthalmology, etc), we will eventually narrow our focus to what those specialties require. It is inevitable that we will forget much of the content we are currently learning in medical school.
Sometimes the breadth of knowledge and being able to confidently practise ‘general’ medicine still appeals to me. In ID it might be possible to retain some of that.
ONE Example of Something You Might See in Infectious Diseases
(Image source: NUH)