A gym girl’s thoughts about the musculoskeletal system course

My school has a systems-based curriculum; we spend about 6 weeks focusing exclusively on one body system, take an exam on it, then move to the next system. The first course our Foundations course, covering some “basics.” Mostly it was a hodge podge of biochemistry, genetics, and immunology to get us all on the same page. The first real systems course I took was the Musculoskeletal System.

First impressions:

Wow, this is so much better than Foundations! I love physiology! Bones are really cool!

Two weeks in:

Wow, sports medicine would be really boring. And bones aren’t that cool. Wait, why is it so important to know that collagen fibers are mostly glycine, lysine, and proline? Vitamin C does what? What??

Five weeks in:

Am I allowed to be a primary care physician if I neither know nor care about the classification of radial fractures? I’ll probably refer to ortho anyway so I can treat more ear infections.

The physiology of muscle contractions and bone resorption and deposition comes back in almost every other system. I was glad it was the first block, so I gained an early understanding of these processes.  The musculoskeletal system also gives a physical basis for the rest of the body. For example, you gotta have a skeleton and muscles first before you have somewhere to put the brain and the guts. Our courses first year went: musculoskeletal, hematology, neurology, cardiology, pulmonary. I liked that we learned first about muscles and bone, then about the blood that feeds those tissues, then about the system that innervates it and makes it moved, and ended the year learning about blood flow through the tissues and perfusion with oxygen of those tissues. 

We had several guest lectures during this course from an orthopedic surgeon. He fulfilled the stereotype of a gym-rat dude-bro, but was also intelligent and a great teacher. While he shared some unique case studies (such as being asked to assist on a surgery to repair a bone fracture in an actual tiger), I never felt drawn to the field. Fractures and bone healing bored me, despite having broken my toe (all the way off, but don’t worry an ER doc put it back), and my siblings and father all having broken bones while I was growing up. I can’t imagine repairing joints all day. While I am a gym-rat, I lack the dude-bro attitude that my ortho-oriented classmates all seem to share. Bones, I decided, are not for me.

Muscle pathophysiology was better than bone. I knew a few people with muscular dystrophy in elementary school, and I finally learned the disease process they were experiencing. However, many physiology lectures were taught through the lens of exercise physiology to illuminate the changes tissues undergo in hypoxic states, trained states, fed and starved states, etc. Even with the personal connection to some muscular diseases, the musculoskeletal system struck me as the perfect course for someone who wants to do knee repairs every day, and nothing but knee repairs. 

A small aside: this was the first time I learned about parasites and specifically a CT scan of cysticercosis infiltrating the liver, brain, and skeletal muscle still scars me. Unfortunately, this disease came up in several courses since then, and continues to haunt me. I don’t recommend you google it.

Difficulty: ⅗

Do I want to specialize in it? No

Did it make me drop out? No

Did it make me want to drop out? No