Artifact: Ultrasound Journal Club
During my 4th year of medical school, I enrolled in an Honors Ultrasound advanced competency. I had been taking ultrasound courses since my 1st year, and felt like this would be a great capstone to my previous experience. The overall structure of the course was altered a bit due to COVID, but the fundamental content stayed the same. We would have a set number of scans we had to complete by the end of the year, and would also have a capstone project we would need to complete. On top of this, we would have monthly journal club to discuss multiple articles prepared by students in the course. This was some of my first experience reading not only academic papers focused on ultrasound, but really reading academic papers in depth. I usually opted for summaries of such papers so as to avoid the lengthy reading.
For my presentation, I chose to cover a paper discussing lung US vs radiography for pneumonia diagnosis in children. It ended up being a really interesting article, and taught me a lot about how to structure a study using US compared to the standard practice. It also expanded my views on the applications of ultrasound and how I could use it in my future practice. Beyond this, I was able to practice my presentation skills, and I believe nothing challenges you to learn a topic better than having to present it to your peers. I learned a lot about how to assess research articles and apply EBM. I know this is an important skill for a life-long learner, and will help me better analyze papers in the future to understand my practice.
My goal going forward is to get more practice reading research articles. I’ve found a document called “52 Articles in 52 Weeks”1 that covers important emergency medicine papers. My goal is to read one of these a week during my intern year.