This tri is awesome! As I've said before, I'm halfway between 6th and 7th tris due to my individualized schedule. I'm taking two technique courses, Pelvic Adjusting and Extremities Adjusting. It took me about a week to get used to Dr. Petterssen's demeanor; he has a very dry sense of humor, which I greatly appreciate. He's a great instructor. He wrote the book on Pelvic adjusting. Really. Dr. Sorgenfry teaches my Extremities class. This doc reminds me of my doc back home. Country at heart, he runs the family farm as well as teaches here. I can really relate to him, being raised in the country myself. Yesterday he gave away free eggs from his chickens to whoever students wanted them. Dr. Sorgenfry is very approachable, warm, and obviously caring. A great example of his dedication to teach is that he is starting up a student/doctor mentoring program with Palmer alumni out in the field, where we can get paired up with doctors practicing in the area in which we want to practice. We will get to go and shadow them in there practice a few times a year. I'm especially looking forward to this as I plan on practicing on the west coast of Florida! Great to have yet another excuse to get down to Florida a few times a year! Since we are planning to locate the practice somewhere on the west coast between Tampa and Naples, but are unsure of which town exactly, it would be very helpful to travel to that area and get a good feel for the different communities, while also getting priceless input from a Chiropractor working in the same area. I truly appreciate Dr. Sorgenfry putting this together. The idea to do this evidently came from an offer from a doctor that was here for the last homecoming, wanting to mentor a student in his practice. It's exciting to see that doctors busy with their own practice and life would want to take time to give counsel and advice to emerging doctors. Its exactly this type of gesture that will help to grow this profession to still higher levels of service and dedication. I'm in the Intro to Clinic class this tri. Name says it all. There's a lot to cover in preparation to start treating patients. Lately we've been discussing issues like Code of Conduct, Ethics, HIPAA, professionalism, Report of Findings, and so on. We had an assignment to actually deliver a report of findings on video recording, so that we can see ways to improve this critical visit. This was an excellent lesson in the power of how we interact with our patients. Subtleties like body language, rate of speach, filler words, eye contact, confidence, and so on, all add up in a huge way. Later this tri as part of this class we actually get into the clinic and do silent observations of doctor patient encounters. I'm really excited about this. First step into the clinic!! In visceral disorders calss with Dr. Tatum, we're learning how to know what appropriate labs need to be ordered in helping to diagnose all the various visceral disorders, and how to interpret these labs. For example, based on information in a patient history you suspect that the patient could be diabetic. We need to know that the proper course of action is to order the appropriate labwork to find out if your suspitions are correct. You need to interpret those labs, and follow up with the appropriate course of action. As Chiropractors we are often a patient's only regular healthcare vsit, and we are on the front line with the patients, and need to be able to recognize any helath problem they could present with, and offer the correct advice. This is huge. It's taking classes like this one that really shout to me "You're going to be a Doctor!!" It's a profound feeling, knowing the responsibility I will soon have to people's health. Scary too, but in a good way. Scaring me into doing everything I can to be the best Doctor I can be, deserving the trust that will be placed in me. Well time to go to Vis Dis. (Visceral Disorders) Talk to you soon.