Blog 2024-10-25

This Tuesday the biomedical interventions class took a trip to the University of South Alabama and their allied health programs. Our first stop was the radiology department, radiology is the branch of medicine that uses imaging technology to diagnose and treat disease. While in the radiology department our guide demonstrated how to use an x-ray machine on a human skull incased in resin. From there, we went to the occupational therapy department and we were able to participate in a lab. The lab involved us wearing a pair of vision modified goggles, I had diabetic retinopathy, and we were tasked with walking to an counter, placing a cookie on a plate, walking back to our table, and decoration the cookie. The lab was to demonstrate the struggles of visionally impaired people completing simple tasks. The third stop was the simulation lab, my personal favorite, and the two patient simulations. The first simulation was a cardiac arrest and the guide had us run the code, I performed CPR for roughly five minutes in total before our patient regained a stable rhythm, which meant we successfully ran our very first code. Throughout the rest of day, we visited speech pathology and audiology, biomedical sciences department, emergency medical services, physical therapy, physician assistant, and the biomedical library at South Alabama. Each department and program we visited offered a vast amount of information that targets toward recruiting more students. The instructors at each stop were very considerate and helpful in fueling our need for information and hands on experience.

In class this week we are focusing on researching any topics that we will detail in our paper and ultimately in our capstone presentation. While we were at South Alabama we were taught how to access their biomedical library online and how to narrow our searches to match with a select few articles. This site and its articles will greatly improve research techniques and information that we will be using in our final draft of the paper. In class, we will be starting the next ten pages of our draft before submitting the full twenty-five page draft in November.