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Which medical schools do full body dissection?


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I have a few questions to ask about dissections at medical school:

 

Which Canadian medical schools do full body dissection with cadavers?

How many students are there per body?

Are there any opportunities for undergrad to experience cadavers or to dissect?

 

You do at Western - 6 students per cadaver, with additional smaller numbers for more detailed dissections in year 4 if desired. Additionally if you volunteer you can get in that lab quite a bit more actually - I prepped all the cadavers for the 1st years in the past for their cardiac lab, and was given entire limbs to dissect on my own multiple times.

 

I don't think these opportunities are unique to Western - I believe Queens and Toronto have similar ones just off the top of my head.

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At Guelph, Human Kinetics and Bio-Medical science undergraduate students have the opportunity to take two anatomy courses in third year that involve the dissection of cadavers. I'm not in either of those programs, so don't know how many students are assigned to one cadaver. The people I know who have taken the course have said they really learned a lot.

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McGill : 4 students per cadaver. Dissection for Lungs, Heart, GI. Prossections used for MSK and Neuro (Head, Neck, Spine).

 

Plus : the opportunity to do a summer bursary project (1month) where you dissect to prepare the prossections for the next year under the supervision of an anatomy teacher. You get paid 2k-3k$ for the whole month.

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McGill : 4 students per cadaver. Dissection for Lungs, Heart, GI. Prossections used for MSK and Neuro (Head, Neck, Spine).

 

Plus : the opportunity to do a summer bursary project (1month) where you dissect to prepare the prossections for the next year under the supervision of an anatomy teacher. You get paid 2k-3k$ for the whole month.

 

In the past Dal was pretty much identical to this. Now anatomy is spread throughout pre-clerkship, so I don't know if students get to do the thoracic and abdominal dissections anymore. (Though they certainly can spend more time in the lab if they want - and we have/had the same summer pro-section opportunities.)

 

I've always thought that dissecting out the heart and lungs was the most appropriate (and greatest) way to start med school.

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Do you think the difference in the amount learned from dissections vs. prosections is significantly different?

 

Personally yes, but I am a bit of an anatomy oriented medical student.

 

Even the shear amount of time it takes to do a dissection leads to more understanding in my mind - but that is just me!

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The most interesting dissection session I've ever been to was an anesthesia "wet lab" they were doing for CV teaching when I was on elective. Instead of preserved cadavers, there were "fresh" pig hearts - it was amazing to see how all the valves arise from a single structure, and generally the anatomy is even clearer without the formalin. Our heart had a PFO too.

 

The other weird thing was that, since every heart also had the inferior trachea attached, it seemed that pigs have a weird accessory bronchus just superior to the carina. Totally bizarre.

 

In any case, I'm really glad I was part of the "old" Dal curriculum where we started out with 8 weeks of nothing but anatomy. We had weekly radiology sessions in the lab too. They're putting more back in now, but the new curriculum left some gaps initially. Unfortunately there's a certain ideology that anatomy teaching is less "useful" and that it reflects an overly "traditional" approach that doesn't reflect the EBM/PBL/self-directed-whatever paradigm.

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honestly i can never motivate myself to do anything but hang with the dentists... the less i touch, the more imaging, lab work, tech i get to use the happier i am... i hate physical exam, **** i have greys, good enough for me, unless i can work as a cardiologist 40 hours a week... which ain't happening

 

clinical pharmacology seems like a pretty sweet fellowship too... and in the us there's pain med, sleep med, neuropsychiatry fellowships on top of psych... clinical pharmacology... the neuropsychiatry fellowship looks insane... and if you like easy money you can pray to god you get a spot over the anesthesia guys for pain med... but that's almost impossible... yeah, none of these ever required me, or will require me to cut open someones prostate... so i think ill just watch, the brain dissections all mine though, that's what my mega sized ridiculous atlas of the brain book is for... LOL

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honestly, i find identifying things on cadavers difficult... a live pig heart would be so much more interesting as you can mess around with it and imagine the preload, release... honestly that's be a great thing to do

 

The most interesting dissection session I've ever been to was an anesthesia "wet lab" they were doing for CV teaching when I was on elective. Instead of preserved cadavers, there were "fresh" pig hearts - it was amazing to see how all the valves arise from a single structure, and generally the anatomy is even clearer without the formalin. Our heart had a PFO too.

 

The other weird thing was that, since every heart also had the inferior trachea attached, it seemed that pigs have a weird accessory bronchus just superior to the carina. Totally bizarre.

 

In any case, I'm really glad I was part of the "old" Dal curriculum where we started out with 8 weeks of nothing but anatomy. We had weekly radiology sessions in the lab too. They're putting more back in now, but the new curriculum left some gaps initially. Unfortunately there's a certain ideology that anatomy teaching is less "useful" and that it reflects an overly "traditional" approach that doesn't reflect the EBM/PBL/self-directed-whatever paradigm.

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lol, being a pathologist doesn't necessarily mean you end up doing autopsies, an you don't often have to be a pathologist to do autopsies in smaller towns

 

I'm not talking about autopsies, I'm talking about gross examination and dissection of fresh specimens for a ''frozen sections'' test. It's one of the bread and butter activities of a pathologist.

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NOSM does prossections only. I dont feel like I am missing out and am a bit relieved that I dont have to. Ive always hated the smell of formaldehyde.

 

I guess if I was a surgery gunner maybe it would be important for me however we also have to realize that anatomy looks very different in preserved cadavers vs live patients.

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in my experience, full body dissections isn't necessarily an optimal way to learn anatomy.

 

we had full body dissections but were severely short-staffed. we had to teach ourselves and since no one in our group had any training, we ended up butchering our specimens. we had almost weekly 3-hour dissections, most of which were wasted. we were rarely if we identified anything correctly. some groups were lucky and got more attention from staff. i learned more with websites like headneckbrainspine and anatomy.tv on cma.

 

even worse, we had no bell-ringers, so there was less motivation to memorize structures.

 

i think calgary's anatomy teaching is very good. they have prosections, meaning the structures were exposed correctly with the correct labels. in each block, they have bell-ringers to motivate students.

 

the old-school thinking that independent full body dissections is the best way to learn depends on the presence of proper guidance. we had very little because our school wasn't prepared the inflation of class sizes.

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yeah, there were no tests, or supervision... it was more go at er guys... k, make attendance, leave

 

I'm not talking about autopsies, I'm talking about gross examination and dissection of fresh specimens for a ''frozen sections'' test. It's one of the bread and butter activities of a pathologist.
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