Peoria med students test ’99 Differentials’ but can’t pick 1

A study break could be dinner or a movie, but second-year medical students Sakina Karimjee and Sabirah Kasule entered a music video contest.

With their classmates at the College of Medicine at Peoria, they created the video “99 Differentials” for the Memmys, a medical version of the Emmys sponsored by the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.

The music video is a satire of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.”

“What we were thinking about is the problem of patients not understanding medical language, and how the miscommunication can have an impact on them,” said Kasule, who produced the video. “So we wanted to start an open dialogue on how to fix that.”

Making the video was motivation to study during their hardest unit, cardiopulmonary renal anatomy and physiology.

“We were excited, and that excitement allowed us to get to the books,” Karimjee said.

The contest calls for fun videos that express the experience of being a medical student, but Karimjee said they wanted to do more.

“We wanted to send a message and use it as a social commentary,” said Karimjee, the video producer.

Winners will be announced in late May or early June. The selection process starts from the top five videos with the most “likes.” From there, a panel of judges decides on first, second and third place. Winners receive money for the school’s health sciences library.

“Even if we don’t win, we want to get the message out and start a conversation,” Karimjee said.

In the video, physicians try to diagnose a patient who doesn’t understand the medical vocabulary, while hospital staff rap and dance to lyrics written by Karimjee and Kasule. Second-year medical student Justin Zheng does the break-dancing.

The message: “In order to be good doctors, there’s more than just science. We have to be humans, too,” Kasule said.