A testimonial about observership with Prof.Shiina and his RFA team (by Dr. Trirat “Pop” Jantarattana)
Dear Shiina sensei
It is my pleasure and honor to write a testimonial for your blog. I hope this could help anyone who is considering observing or attending any program here to easily decide to join without hesitation. I promise you will surely get a valuable experience as I had.
My 2-week observership with Prof.Shiina and his RFA team has been a very fruitful time. He is a kind energizing doctor with a great professional team.
As the busiest RFA center in Japan with more than five hundred cases a year, more than twice as my center in Bangkok, I had opportunities to see many cases everyday. Some techniques are quite frequently performed here; including artificial ascites, US with CT/MRI navigation as well as contrast-enhanced US. These are rather different from where I have come from, giving me ideas of their usefulness. Work flow of the procedures was impressive either. How they manage such a large number of cases in limited time and space is another thing worth mentioning. We also had further discussions on distinct approaches and techniques in each patient which helped me to understand individualized treatment in such conditions.
Additionally, I had a chance observing a case of TACE. It let me see another treatment, again using pretty different techniques from what I am familiar with. Since in Thailand interventional radiologists dominate in doing RFA and TACE, seeing how gastroenterologists here manage these treatments themselves is really interesting for me.
Apart from RFA demonstration, I attended the case conferences and ward round as well. Even the conferences were all in Japanese, it was not too hard to get main ideas on what they were speaking by observing the images and data shown on the screen. Prof.Shiina and his colleagues took a very good care of me during the ward round by explaining things in English. It gave me an idea of which are common conditions in Japan. Furthermore, it was a chance to observe the clinical circumstance of hospitalization here.
All in all, I would like to wholeheartedly thank you all, Prof.Shiina, Dr.Sato and Dr.Kanazawa, all members in RFA room as well as everyone in Prof.Shiina’s office. You gave me a wonderful experience indeed. I hope we all could meet again in the near future.
Best regards,
Trirat “Pop” Jantarattana, M.D.
Resident of diagnostic radiology
King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital
Bangkok, Thailand
(Click to enlarge)
Jantarattana 先生は年末年始を北海道で過ごしたとのことで写真が送られてきました。
