As a fourth-year medical student at Johns Hopkins, I have had the privilege of working with attending physicians in a number of outpatient clinics. My roles in the clinic have varied. In most clinics, I see the patient independently, take a history, and perform a physical exam. I then describe the course of the illness,(...)
About Alisa Mo
Posts by Alisa Mo:
Johns Hopkins Scientists Examine the Effect of Spaceflight on the Human Body
How does spaceflight change the human body? Scientists have known for many years that traveling to space leads to cellular changes. Spaceflight can weaken bones, suppress the immune system, damage DNA and potentially contribute to cancer. A unique study of identical twins seeks to expand our knowledge of the impact of space travel on the(...)
Breaking Down Where the Money Goes: Personal and Public Health Care Spending in the United States
The United States spends more money on health care than any other country — $2.9 trillion in 2014, or about $9,110 per person. Spending continues to increase. With the arrival of the new Trump administration, the debate on health care costs is heightening. In preparation, let’s take a closer look at U.S. health care costs(...)
An iPad Game Helps Children with Amblyopia Improve Their Vision
“She needs to see an eye doctor,” the pediatrician told the parents of a preschool child. I, a first-year medical student at the time, was shadowing a community pediatrician to learn more about medicine. During a physical exam, the pediatrician had noted that the child’s eyes were misaligned — one eye turned slightly inward toward(...)
Implementing Precision Medicine in an Academic Hospital
Precision medicine, or personalized medicine, is a growing field that uses big data to treat the individual patient. It uses tools such as DNA sequencing and bioinformatics to ask, “What are the individual characteristics of my patient?” — for example, in her genetic makeup, environment or in the mutation profile of her tumor — and(...)
Johns Hopkins Scientists Study How Neurons Create Connections During Development
Pretend for a moment that you’re a developing neuron in the mammalian cerebral cortex. Your cell body, which houses the command center of the neuron, sits in one out of the six cortical layers. Your job is to establish the proper connections with up to thousands of other neurons. How do you establish these connections?(...)
Bangladeshi-American Student Aims to Bridge Relationships with Underserved Patients
Transitioning to my medical school clerkship after my Ph.D. training was stressful. After a five-year absence from the clinic, my medical knowledge and clinical skills were rusty. My practical knowledge — for example, how to find information in medical charts or how to present patients in morning rounds — also needed improvement. But beyond lacking(...)
Carolina Montano: From Political Asylum to Johns Hopkins M.D./Ph.D.
I remember the day I first met Carolina Montano, a fellow student in the Johns Hopkins M.D./Ph.D. program. It was toward the beginning of my first year in medical school. We were both at a dinner for M.D./Ph.D. interviewees, and, as with many conversations between medical students, we inevitably began to discuss our classes. Carolina(...)
What I Learned: Thoughts from a Graduating Ph.D. Student
“Every blossom exhibits an exquisite disorder of ragged petals finer than lace. But one needs a lens to judge of their beauty: it lies hidden from the power of our eyes, and menyanthes must have bloomed and passed a million times before there came any to perceive and salute her loveliness. The universe is full(...)
A Project Bridge Event on Multiple Sclerosis and the Role of Patient Empowerment
Here on campus, Project Bridge is a student organization that aims to bridge the gap between biomedical science and the general public. On April 16th, Project Bridge sponsored a Science Café event about multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is a disease that involves the central nervous system and results in damage to the myelin sheaths that(...)
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