BulletAVMX 716 – Clinical Aspects of Occupational Medicine

 

This, the second paper in general occupational medicine for this course, deals with the more technical aspects of occupational health practice, and continues to discuss specific occupational health problems and their management.

Of the subjects discussed in this paper, some will interest you intellectually, others will have relevance to and practical applications for some aspects of your work. Some of them have important lessons for any aspect of medical care - in particular, the modules on occupational noise, lung diseases, and allergy/dermatology. There is some room for you to pick and choose, and to devote more time to topics that interest you, but I would encourage you to open up new areas of expertise and explore some of the new and unfamiliar subjects.

This paper aims to add to the general understanding of occupational medicine you will have gained from paper AVMX 715, and to introduce you to some of the more technical aspects of the discipline. Some of the subject areas are quite esoteric, especially diving and occupational cancer, but it is important that occupational physicians understand technical areas outside their own narrow field, if only to avoid tunnel vision. Aviation medicine specialists will find that many of these other technical areas impinge on their own particular area.

The modules run through the sciences - physical, chemical, and biological (respectively: noise, diving medicine, radiation, and lighting; industrial hygiene and cancer; allergy, and lung diseases). Each has a lot of factual content, much of it quite specialised and technical, but you will find it more important to understand broad principles than to memorise detailed facts. The modules have attempted to combine a comprehensive guide with selected readings sufficient to enable you to understand the subject in quite some detail, without overwhelming you. It is difficult to find the right balance, and there is inevitably some compromise here. There may be more detail than you would want in some areas that don't interest you, and perhaps the material is too superficial and brief in areas that do. After completing each module, however, you should have a clear overview of the field, and know where to go next to explore further any subject of special interest.

As in AVMX 715, the division of subject material may appear somewhat arbitrary. Sometimes, the material in some topics was so vast that it was decided to make an artificial split for manageability - so allergic lung diseases have joined occupational dermatology in the module on occupational allergy, for example. Occupational cancer receives a module of its own. Some modules are quite short, others quite hefty tomes in their own right, but this size does not necessarily reflect its importance to you as a student: some of the smaller topics may be more relevant to your work, and you may want to spend more time on them and less on the magnum opus modules.

The nine modules which comprise the paper are as follows:

  1. Occupational Noise
  2. Lighting and Vision
  3. Radiation and Electrical Hazards at Work
  4. Occupational Lung Disorders
  5. Occupational Allergy, Asthma and Dermatitis
  6. Occupational Cancer
  7. Shift work
  8. Occupational Hygiene
  9. Occupational Diving and Compressed Air at Work