Round #3: Cardiology

Yes, I've noticed that last time it was Round 1, but seriously, Round 2 has been Dermatology. And if you found the post about Chest Medicine boring, I assure you that talking about glancing at people's hands for 2 weeks would have been infinitely more boring (not to mention the bore of having to physically exist there for 2 weeks). So let's just pretend it's never happened.

We're almost done with Cardiology. A fascinating science that I would have loved to spend more time on. The thing is that you spend like 9 days with wide opened eyes and dropped jaw every time anybody tries to make you understand anything, and just when you're about to understand what you are supposed to be doing in the first place, your time is up! and you have to move on to another Round where you spend another 9 days of wide open eyes and dropped jaw.

Cardiology is basically like Maths. The heart is a machine that works according to the most accurately synchronized rules in your body, and even when it's sick, it obeys another set of sickness rules. Once you grasp  these rules you can workout any clinical issue you're supposed to solve.
Assuming you get through understanding and remembering all the rules, you have to get through the hardest part, that is clinical examination. You have to auscultate the heart and detect events that occur in fractions of seconds. You have to differentiate sounds that overlap each other and tell what happened before what. Rumor has it that these things get easier by practice, but 2 weeks is not enough time to practice anything at all.
But truth be said, who would have ever thought that we have a "heartman"? A doll that is adjusted to simulate auscultatory findings of different cardiac conditions. After auscultating the doll, we thought everything perfectly made sense and that we could go back to the ward and immediately be cardiologists and start diagnosing cases. But the next day brought our senses back. The doll shows the standard typical sounds described in books, has a longer cardiac cycle and slower breathing rate than that in humans, which gives you time to hear well and analyze what you've heard, making the experience completely different from that you'd have with real life patients. So it's practice, practice and only practice, the key to learning any clinical skill in medicine.

Diagnostic and therapeutic techniques in cardiology  are constantly under development. Even beginning to understand how the technique works and how to interpret its data takes many hours as well as many textbooks. We're only taught crumbs of course.
 
One of the branches I'd tag "to be considered".  And who knows? May be someday.