Blog 3: Back to Berlin

After spending a wonderful weekend in Prague, it was back to some education time. On Monday morning, we visited the Charite skills training center for docters in Berlin. Here, we took a tour of the facility and then practice some routine training exercises such as CPR, inspection of the ear canal, and my favorite, intubation using a dummy mannequin. Intubation requires using a curved shaped tool to push the tongue back so that a tube can be inserted through the trachea so that air can be pumped into the lungs. What makes this procedure a little bit tricky is that the tube may end up sliding into the esophagus. If this happens, and air is pumped in, gastric acids can flow back up the esophagus and backflow into the lungs, which could lead to pneumonia. But, I placed the tube into the trachea correctly on my first attempt, because I am awesome. In the afternoon, we toured the Otto Bock Science Center, which was incredibly fascinating. They had 3 floors to show off several designs the company has worked on, ranging from prosthetics to mobility devices. As a biomedical engineer, I felt like a kid in a candy store. Yeah I know - I’m a nerd.

The rest of the week consisted of various types of tours. On Tuesday, we went to Dreden and toured the city, as well as the Deutsches Hygiene Museum. Our museum tour included an assignment, which was to visit one of the sections of the museum and then present the section to the rest of the group. David, Chris, and I were assigned the beauty section, which in all honesty was not at the top of our list of favorite things to do. However, we did come across an interesting, interactive activity to show off. It was a microscopic camera to observe hair follicles. Nicole, Katie, and Kate were nice enough to donate a strand of hair to compare the black, brown, and blonde hair, respectively. The next day, we visited the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Robert Koch Institute (which also had a museum in it). In all honesty, both were not all that interesting to me and I am really not sure why. However, Thursday was one of my favorite days of the trip so far. In the morning, we visited the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Here, our tour guide focused more on the medical experimentation that went on at the camp, whose focus was using the prisoners as workers rather than exterminating them. Many of the SS doctors conducted experiments on the prisoners for research. While they did it to advance medicine, it violated every code of ethics in use today. Note that I mentioned the “code of ethics in use today”. During that period, there really was not ethics in medicine and the doctors felt as if they did nothing wrong. However, the rest of the world did not see that, and as a result, held trials to attempt to convict these doctors of their inhumane deeds. Overall, while it was a fascinating trip, there was a lingering mood of depression and sympathy among my colleagues and myself. For the most part, everyone remained fairly quiet as we were quite taken back in awe. I mean, I have spent a good portion of time learning about World War II history, yet I have never felt so sad learning about the Holocaust as I did when I was at the concentration camp. Visiting the area where a gas chamber and crematory were located, and knowing I was standing on ashes of murdered innocent people, truly made me realize the terrible price these people paid so that the world’s eyes would be lifted to the horrors of genocide.