October 2018
Another month has flown by, and my appreciation for doctors bringing hope and life to patients swells everyday. The number of drugs, drug interactions, mechanisms of action, and any information that could complicate a patient's recovery are just a few components of what doctors must have mastered to be able to safely treat their patients. So far we have built upon the foundation established during the Basic Principles module with more common diseases like heart failure, cardiac arrhythmias, and many others with the ANS and CV/Renal modules. The ANS module has been particularly exciting as it has given me a new perspective on the vascular surgery research I have been a part of over the last three years at Vanderbilt Medical Center. There we have been attempting to develop a method to prevent vein graft failures after bypass surgery and determine the best solution to store veins during surgery. We also focused a lot of our research on the endothelial-dependent vasodilation of smooth