Dehydration is a common but potentially serious clinical condition that reflects a failure of the body to maintain fluid and electrolyte balance — a core example of disrupted homeostasis.
Even small fluid deficits can impair circulation, organ perfusion, and cellular function, particularly in infants, older adults, and unwell patients.
Water is essential for life, and maintaining fluid balance is a core component of homeostasis. The body works continuously to keep its internal environment stable, but illness, exertion, heat exposure, or inadequate intake can quickly disrupt this balance.
Dehydration exists on a spectrum — from mild physiological stress to life-threatening hypovolaemic shock — with progressively worsening signs and symptoms as circulating volume falls.
No matter where you are up to in your training, anatomical terminology is the foundation of precise communication in medicine.
Instead of saying “towards the head” or “away from the body”, clinicians use standardised terms that mean the same thing to everyone — in any hospital, clinic, or country.
This shared language eliminates ambiguity and reduces the risk of miscommunication.
Vital signs provide immediate, objective insights into a patient’s physiological status and are often the earliest indicators of deterioration or underlying pathology. As healthcare professionals, accurate measurement and interpretation of these parameters is essential for guiding assessment and clinical decision-making.
Underneath every diagnosis is a simple, powerful question:
What has disrupted the body’s ability to maintain balance?
That balance is called homeostasis.
The answer lies in how your brain processes and encodes new material. Note-taking isn’t just about capturing information—it’s about engaging with it in ways that enhance understanding and memory. The method you use matters more than you might think.
Let’s explore the science behind different note-taking strategies and active learning techniques that can help strengthen retention, improve comprehension, and boost recall.
Cells are the fundamental units of life, forming the structural and functional basis of all living organisms. In the human body, they are highly specialised, working collectively to maintain homeostasis, metabolism, communication, and survival.
When cells are exposed to physiological stress — such as dehydration, heat, or reduced oxygen availability — their ability to maintain normal function can be compromised. Understanding how cells are structured and how they function provides a foundation for understanding disease, and for the physiology, pathology, and pharmacology you will encounter throughout the course.
Kumar and Clark’s Clinical Medicine is a core
clinical textbook that many students encounter early in medical school. Used
well, it can be an excellent starting point in Phase 1, providing a
coherent clinical framework that helps make sense of the science you are
learning alongside it.
Many students find it helpful to read a relevant section of Kumar and Clark first — slowly, with a cup of tea — to get the clinical picture, before diving into the associated physiology, anatomy, or biochemistry.
Read on for more information about why this may be very useful for your learning.
The skin is far more than a passive covering—it’s a highly specialised organ that plays a role in homeostasis, immunity, sensation, thermoregulation, and biochemical synthesis. Understanding its multifaceted functions is crucial in medicine.
This is not a checklist or a set of rules. Instead, it’s intended as a prompt for reflection: how you approach learning, how you prioritise understanding over volume, and how to avoid the pull towards rote memorisation.
You don’t need to adopt everything you hear here. Use it as a way to think critically about what works for you, especially as you transition into Phase 1 and case-based learning.
Early in medical school, you’ll hear a lot of advice about understanding rather than memorising. That can sound reassuring — but also frustratingly vague. When you’re faced with a lot of new content, it’s reasonable to wonder what you’re actually meant to do differently.
In Phase 1, understanding doesn’t mean knowing everything. It means being able to explain how things work and why they matter, even if the finer detail isn’t solid yet.
When people think about becoming a doctor, they often imagine diagnosing disease and prescribing treatment. Biology matters — but very early in clinical practice, it becomes clear that biology alone does not explain who becomes unwell, how illness progresses, or why outcomes differ so markedly between patients.
This is where social determinants of health become essential to clinical reasoning.
Social determinants are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. They shape exposure to risk, access to care, capacity to recover, and the choices people realistically have available to them. Importantly, they influence health long before a patient enters a clinic — and continue to shape outcomes long after a prescription is written.
Starting medical school can feel like drinking from a firehose. One day you’re diving into biochemistry, anatomy, and physiology; the next, you’re untangling the brachial plexus and trying to make sense of cardiac output. It’s an overwhelming amount of information, and it’s very common to feel like you need to keep up with everything at once.
Here’s the key message early on: the details matter, but understanding matters more.
The skin is the largest organ of the body, functioning as a physical barrier while supporting immune defence, thermoregulation, and sensory input. Structurally, it consists of three main layers, each with unique cell types and functions.
