Help! I don't understand anatomy!?

Question

I'm in medical school and the pace we're going at in anatomy is crazy. We covered the entire arm in a span of 4 hours and the prof skipped a lot of the stuff and said we can figure it out on our own in our own time.

I have NO anatomy background and I feel lost! My problem is that I have a hard time remembering what nerve innervates what muscle, and what blood vessel goes where. It doesn't help looking at a table that tells me the information because it's meaningless because I can't visualize it. I tried looking in the book at the musculature, and innervation as separate systems and it makes sense but then putting it together with the muscles is hard. What do I do? Any tips to visualize it all?

Answer 1

I have studied a total of 4 anatomy subjects between two universities during the course of my BSc (BmedSc).

I found the best way to memorise was to use acronyms - use the first letter of each muscle in the arm to tell a story.

One of the best anatomy textbooks I found was one by Marieb - Elaine Marieb is an RN and puts anatomy comparatively simple and easy to follow compared to other anatomy textbooks out there.

Get a poster on muscles, too, and put it up on the wall in your room (some of us had them on our ceilings so we could lay down and study - ultimate in laziness) and others put them on their bathroom walls.

Good luck and have fun. :-)

Thanks, Marie: mnemonics was the word I was looking for but all I could think of was 'acronyms'.  Thanks!

Answer 2

One word of advice from a more veteran med student: You're not alone, chances are there's something weird with you if you complained seeing human anatomy in 2 semesters is going too slow (in Mexico's military school, they see it in only 4 months, ack!! Insanity!).

The second thing, you'll probably forget those muscles and bone incrustations right after you deliver your final exam paper. You see certain parts of human anatomy so little in the career it's scary really (you'll probably never seen human arm muscles ever again the way it happened to me).

The first two years of the career are so full of memorization of boring topics which is more of a foundation more than what you'll be doing in the real world. I've never seen real doctors that weren't Pathologists look at histology pieces under the microscope everyday.

Things get far more interesting once you go to hospitals, hang on there!

As for the arm nerves, it's not so tough. Forearm is the easiest: Thumb: radial artery/nerve, Index and middle finger: Medial artery/nerve and Anular and pinky finger: Ulnar or cubital artery/nerve.

Brachial vein is very visible at the flexor side of your elbow and the circunflex nerve sort of circles the delotids and biceps muscle.

Luckily you'll resee some of the anatomy stuff here and there is later semesters, but arm muscles? Nope. I did have some un-pleasant surprises in some traumatology & orthopedics tests last year where they asked some leg anatomy questions that totally blew me off because I hadn't seen those topics in ages. >_<

Answer 3

Well, first of all, don't knock yourself over this because plenty of people have a hard time remembering these details, and truthfully it is not the most important part of medical school.  You will be the best judge of how you best commit things to rote memory.  I had classmates who studied for 10 hours a day memorizing these things.

Personally, I found the visuals from Netter's anatomy books the most helpful, both in terms of breaking things down and being full of pretty pictures.  Anatomy lab was very helpful to, as long as I kept the time spent there high-yield, e.g. go in with an agenda of what you want to see, discuss your findings with classmates but don't socialize, then get out in a reasonable amount of time.  Also, looking at multiple dissections helps give you a sense of where things typically are, instead of just looking at your dissection.

At least in terms of nerve stuff, I had a technique that sounds crazy, but seemed to work.  When I tried to memorize nerves and their paths, I would try to give myself zingers either hitting them or poking at them on myself.  For example, I still, to this day, remember some of the facial cutaneous nerves by the times I spent rubbing them to give myself zingers.  And who will ever forget that the ulnar nerve is the "funny bone" after you give it a good whack? :)

Answer 4

Does it help to know this subject drove most of us crazy?

Get a good anatomy textbook--I loved Netter's--and sleep with it under your pillow.  Tables didn't help me either, but looking at pictures did.

If your school is like mine, you started with the arm.  It DOES get easier as you go on and you've already mastered at least one area, because then you have a framework in your mind of how you organize your thoughts.  

But if you think the arm is confusing, wait till you hit Head and Neck.  (Sorry, we were meant to be being helpful, weren't we?)  Just stick with it and remember that this too shall pass.

Lots of helpful mnemonics to be found here:  www.medicalmnemonics.com.  Search under Anatomy.

Good luck!

Answer 5

In medical school anatomy we used a cadaver in a lab.  We stayed at the lab and dissected until we could understand what we were looking at and then started at one end of it, and identified it to the other (hand, elbow, shoulder, etc.)  The old way - a cadaver, a student or two, a book, and a knive.