James Douglass

This is my fourth volunteer entry for the 2025 Mini Medical School at Midwestern University which accounts for the hour of in-person mentoring and 6 hours of online planning and editing case study presentations with my students. The final drafts of poster presentations were due so me and my students combined our perspectives on what makes a professional, scientific presentation that maintained the understood scope of the material in a manner that was easily deliverable for the student. I offered my students to take their time outside of Mini-Med and ruminate on the edits they thought may be necessary before proposing a draft so that I could provide feedback. After a few collaborated drafts each of my students produced a polished poster that was informative on its own and served as a great presentation tool. This portion of the experience gave me the opportunity to practice a new caliber of leadership skill akin to project management. Managing the upcoming submission deadline of the poster with the time I wanted to provide for student editing and my own feedback simulated the stress of a team project that I was responsible for. The outcome turned out well and the process allowed for my students to have genuine ownership and feel proud about their final work without being unduly stressful.
A final hour of in-person presentation practice was spent using our recently crafted final posters. This was our chance to rehearse public speaking skills and see how our conversational flow of the material actually sounded before the competition next week. Mostly this was an exercise in instilling confidence for my mentees since they already had what the needed from the prior weeks. It was truly rewarding to witness the progression of my mentees into confident young scientists that could teach about their case studies and even handle potential questions from a curious audience.

This was the 3rd installment in the 2025 Mini Medical School series at Midwestern University. In the first half of the day I had the pleasure of mentoring a group of about 10 high school students and reinforcing lessons learned from the prior week about taking a patient history. We acted out a hypothetical patient encounter similar to last week, however this time I was the provider instead of the patient. This gave me the chance to quiz the students and engage them on the material they had been learning while at Mini Med. I enjoyed being in this role since I got to control the cadence of the discussion and the amount of involvement from the high schoolers. I find that learning happens the most during memorable scenarios where the students are having dialogue with the patient themselves rather than being shown, so I focused on commending successful student questions and only correcting when needed. I felt grateful for having the chance to witness young learners practice taking a history because it also informed me about common pitfalls I can sometimes experience when taking a history.
In the second half of the day I resumed working on the case study presentations with my original two high school students from the prior weeks. Our topic of focus for the day was to understand the healthcare teams involved for our cases. One student's study listed the other hospitalists involved in the healthcare team, while the other did not mention any at all. This highlighted the potential absence of credit that healthcare workers other than physicians can face in these complex cases and provided awareness to these team members' roles for me and my high schoolers. We spent the session assembling a hypothetical team of healthcare workers from diverse fields that would be helpful for our patients and gained a better understanding of the colleagues we may be working alongside as future physicians.

This was the second session in the 2025 Mini Medical School series for high school students. In the first half of the day I had the pleasure of checking in the high school students as they arrived and shortly after participated in a hypothetical patient interaction emphasizing the importance of taking a patient history. I was assigned a group of about 10 high schoolers and given the role of patient while a fellow DO student played the role of provider and exemplified the steps involved in taking a history. The students were tested on what crucial pieces of information were needed to be obtained from the patient as well as how to ask those questions. I got the opportunity to be creative and act like a genuine patient so that I could reinforce practical techniques in obtaining patient history for the young pre-med students, which was both entertaining and rewarding.
In the second half of the day I returned to the same two students I mentored last week and we continued focusing on our selected clinical case studies of interest. The objective of today was to gain a complete understanding of the involved organ systems, treatment, and outcome. As mentioned previously, these case studies involved areas of science and medicine that I was not yet an expert in, so me and my students got to experience a genuine process of learning alongside each other that was truly enriching.

This was my second experience serving at the CCOM Soft Tissue Clinic. In a genuine patient setting I got to practice my history taking skills, diagnosing and treating of somatic dysfunctions, and honing the art of building the patient-provider relationship. The case that day was a high yield learning opportunity since it involved the identification and treatment of a tight psoas muscle, a topic recently covered in class. This complemented my prior experience at the Soft Tissue Clinic since it too involved a psoas dysfunction, the key difference being that this time I had tools and information learned from class I was ready to apply. The DO on duty at the clinic shared her insights on our patient in-take, how this problem is quite common and crucial to the successful osteopathic physician, as well as techniques we ought to perform today to address the dysfunction. I was pleased to hear that the techniques she suggested were already ones I had in mind and were comfortable with performing. After treating our patient of the day we noticed improvement on her reassessment, she even reporting noticeable relief in that moment. In retrospect I cherished this volunteer experience since I led the encounter from beginning to end as if I were the physician and did not rely on any assistance from my accompanying second year mentor. The ownership of the encounter and positive result will certainly reinforce the importance of the psoas in my future career as a DO.

This was the first 2025's Mini Med sessions, where DO students get to mentor high school students with their first exposure medical case studies and introduce them to foundational concepts in medical education. My initial duties included welcoming the cohort of high schoolers as they arrived and assisting them with connecting to the internet on campus. Later on, I had the pleasure of being assigned two students and helping them select clinical case studies that captured their interests to focus on for the next few weeks. It was rewarding to understand the interests of my students that drew them to medicine and foster those interests by locating related clinical case studies. We spent the time learning how to search for the case studies by utilizing online tools from PubMed and trying our best to understand the general ideas of the articles. It was a learning process for the high schoolers and myself since much of the content was brand new to me, and this made the experience all the more rewarding.

During my volunteer shift at the CCOM Soft Tissue Clinic, I had the opportunity to practice patient intake by applying the history-taking and vital sign skills learned in our Physical Exam Skills course. I also utilized techniques from our OMM curriculum to assess for somatic dysfunction. Under the guidance of an experienced second-year student, we provided soft tissue OMT to help relieve the patient’s discomfort using methods we had recently learned in class.

Our findings and treatment were later reviewed with Dr. Koth, who offered valuable feedback and additional instruction. She encouraged us to assess the psoas muscle and demonstrated new techniques to address tightness in that area—tools frequently used by DOs to improve patient mobility and comfort. By the end of the visit, the patient reported noticeable relief and expressed genuine gratitude for the care provided.

Being able to apply classroom knowledge in a real clinical setting deepened my appreciation for our coursework and helped connect theoretical concepts to tangible patient outcomes. It was a rewarding experience to contribute meaningfully to a patient’s well-being and strengthened my motivation to continue developing my clinical and OMT skills.

As feedback, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that HVLA techniques are not permitted for volunteers at the clinic. While I understand the precaution, I hope this policy may evolve in the future. In the meantime, I look forward to continuing to refine my soft tissue and other OMT techniques to provide the best care possible within the current guidelines.