5 Basic Practical Tests Taught in Medical Course

A medical student will not only read textbooks or listen to lectures or prepare notes for exams but they needs to spend a significant amount of time in doing practical. Some of the important practical that students needs to perform are as follows:

• Testing Blood type: Testing blood type of a person is very important. It is very necessary to test the blood type of both donor and recipient before any blood transfusion. Blood type means a specific carbohydrate chains on the surface of Red Blood Cell (RBC). Four major blood groups are – Group A, Group B, Group AB and Group O. Blood type of a person is determined by agglutination experiment. Medical student will be taught how to determine the blood type of a person by agglutination process.
• Measuring blood pressure: You may have heard the term ‘blood pressure’ many times before taking admission in MBBS. But now you will learn the procedure of measuring blood pressure reading. You will learn how to inflate a pressure cuff, how to place a stethoscope down the arm on the artery of a person and then slowly deflating the pressure cuff.
• Saccade Eye Movement: All human beings move their eyes in different ways. Basically there are four types of eye movement. They are saccade, smooth pursuit, vergence and vestibule-ocular. Saccade movement of eye is basically a quick movement of eye that are characterised by sudden changes from point to point. Saccade eye movement are grouped by three characteristics: reflexive saccade, memory-guided saccade and predictive saccade. Student will learn why it is necessary to take saccade eye movement and how to take it.
•  Electrocardiogram (ECG): ECG is a basic test that doctor advised to do when a person suffers from chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness, fainting, etc. Most of the heat related disease like arrhythmias, myocarditis, enlargement of the heart etc. can be diagnosed by ECG. ECG is the first step in diagnosing an abnormality with the heart. Medical students will be taught how to diagnose through ECG.     
• Reflex Testing: Reflex testing is used to detect the presence of disease like polio, muscular dystrophy, muscle wasting disease, etc. It is also used to diagnose whether the neurological system is functioning rightly or not, whether the central and peripheral nervous system is communicating correctly or not, etc. In every medical college students are taught how to perform reflex testing.