Amrin Kharawala – Medical College Baroda
MEDI 413 – Nephrology
I am a medical student from India and I rotated in the Nephrology department. I found it a very wholesome experience. Along with consults, I got to see the dialysis unit and how hemodialysis works. I also got to spend time in the Transplant and Fellow’s clinic. Apart from that, this experience allowed me to attend the morning reports and noon conference with Internal Medicine and hence gain insight into the activity of IM residents.
My advice to future students would be: take initiative. You need to be active, ask questions, ask for consults, offer to write patient notes and that way, you will have a more fulfilling experience. The Nephrology team loves to teach and I got to learn clinical stuff as in how to dose anti-hypertensive medications and calculate free water deficit and manage the actual treatment of patients with hypernatremia. They even took informal lectures for students and we got to attend Nephrology conferences, grand rounds and pathology conference that enhanced our learning experience.
The rotation is not very hectic and we get enough time to interact with patients and then read up more about their pathology.
What was different about the rotation: Nephrologists love urine! And they love to spin the urine and diagnose urine sediments. By the end of my rotation, I could independently identify various casts and crystals in the urine sediment.