During our September Internal Medicine Review Course, we caught up with MedStudy contributor Pearce Korb, MD and discussed his passion for medicine, specifically as it relates to his specialty, neurology.
Medical School: Emory University School of Medicine
Residency: Emory University
Current Position: Associate Professor and Director, Medical Student Clerkship; Director, Epilepsy Fellowship
Position with MedStudy: Internal Medicine Course Speaker
MS: How/When did you know you wanted to be a doctor?
PK: Well, I originally attended University of Florida for business administration and worked at a camp for kids who had diabetes. I had always wanted to be a camp counselor, so, that is why I did it. I loved actually talking to doctors and nurses about blood sugar. They allowed students to weigh in on the camper’s level of activity and we got to have input on their insulin regimens. That felt like real medicine to me. I’m sure the doctors knew exactly what they wanted to do but they let us say like “oh, Billy has been really active today, so, we can cut back on his insulin because he has been playing soccer.” That’s when I saw medicine as the connection between science and improving people’s lives.
MS: How did you know your specialty was right for you?
PK: I am a neurologist, so, it is kind of unique, even though this is a board review for internal medicine, internists have to do some bit of neurology. This is kind of a nerdy side note, but neurology used to be a fellowship off of internal medicine. It was considered a specialization of internal medicine. It kind of makes sense. So, what happened is neurology got so big it had to split off on its own as a residency program and everything else. So, you choose when you are in medical school if you want to do internal medicine or neurology. I was actually in between the two. When I got to medical school, I fell in love with a couple things, but I really liked cardiology because of the physiology of it. Electrophysiology specifically. A lot of people talk about EKGs—electrophysiology of the heart—but I fell in love with electrophysiology, but of the brain. So, ultimately I went into neurology instead of internal medicine. But, they are very similar—you can go into hospital-based care with neurology, you can go into outpatient-based care with neurology. We treat acute diseases, chronic diseases. So, I think it is pretty similar to internal medicine. It is just that [neurologists] choose to focus on neurologic disease.
MS: What is the most rewarding part of your current position?
PK: Oh wow, the most rewarding? I am an associate professor at the University of Colorado Department of Neurology. More specifically, I am an epileptologist, so my clinical specialization is in the treatment of people with epilepsy and related diseases. In academics, I am an educator, so, I am the medical student clerkship director. I oversee the medical student education for neurology.
I think that the most rewarding part of my position is the freedom to pursue education more formally. I can do conferences like this one! I can teach primary care providers, internists, other neurologists, and medical students who are just figuring out what they want to do with medicine. That is the most specific fun-and-rewarding thing. I also teach patients. I think everyone of us in medicine is meant to teach patients how to live healthy lives. I think teaching is an element all the way through, but I get to do it more formally. I consider [myself] not just a teacher at a school, but also the principal and administrator. So, I get to be creative and think about how they learn and that sort of thing, and I like that a lot.
MS: What is one of your top self-care tips when teaching patients?
PK: There are so many different topics, but one of the things I am seeing the most come up with my patients is sleep hygiene. I think the medical community is really catching on to how sleep or the lack of sleep really affects your health. In neurology, and my world of epilepsy, patients are very sensitive to sleep deprivation. So I talk to my patients a lot about sleep apnea and sleep hygiene, like, you shouldn’t sleep in a room with the TV in it, you shouldn’t have your work papers out and about in your bedroom. In fact, I know most of us love to read before bed and swear about the effects of reading, its actually not good for you to read intense material before bed. You should reserve 30–45 mins, so, if you intend to fall asleep at 10 o’clock at night, you should start trying to go to bed at 9:15–9:30.
MS: What advice do you have for our initial certifiers or recertifiers?
PK: On the theme of getting good sleep, I think it is well known for the people who are taking this examination—they have been taking exams for most of their professional lives—that getting good rest up to a week beforehand is essential.
[This is] probably not breaking new ground, but there was a study done by a pediatric neurologist that talked about study strategies that work and don’t work. I don’t mean to self-plug MedStudy, but doing programs like this and using formats that test you are important for long-term learning. It is what they call test and retest, so taking time to take a course like this where there are testing elements is so important. And as much as you can disperse it throughout and take what you learn here and keep reading on a regular interval, it works better than almost anything else. They researched taking notes, highlighting, resummarizing, and most of those are not shown to work for long-term potentiation and long-term learning. So, the best things to use are test and retest strategies. You take this material and even during the presentations we ask the audience, you know, here is a case, what do you think? And they think about it. And then they should retest themselves after the lecture and go back over the material. Did you retain what was said to you during the course?
So, that is what I would say, test yourself, get good sleep, and do so frequently.
MS: What has been your favorite memory from a MedStudy course?
PK: I really appreciated how gracious the audience was with my feedback at the last course. I lost my voice, at least most of it. I was able to struggle through the material, but people were very kind about that. I was at least able to get the information out there, but the audience was really understanding of that and it shows that all the presenters who came before me must have done a pretty good job of entertaining and informing the crowd because they gave me a lot of credit.
A big thank you to Dr. Korb for chatting with us at #MedStudyARC! Meet more of MedStudy’s physicians by signing up for our monthly newsletter, reading our blog, or registering for the next IM Course. Tell us which MedStudy physicians you want to hear from next on Twitter and Facebook.