Contributing Writer
Albany Medical College
Preeti Panda is a 4th year medical student at Albany Medical College where she is pursuing an MD with a Distinction in Advocacy. Her research focuses on the sex trafficking of domestic minors and the role of health care providers. Preeti graduated from Cornell University in 2011 with a major in Biological Sciences and minors in both Global Health and Law & Society. Prior to medical school she served as an Americorps member at a charter high school where she worked with low-income and at-risk youth.
A few years ago when I was working at a charter school in upstate New York, one of my students was caught “prostituting herself” to men she was messaging online. When asked, she said she was doing so for a 30-year-old man she claimed was her boyfriend. Word about this traveled quickly at school. Students talked about her behind her back and called her a “hoe.”
Editor’s note: This article is in response to “From the Editorial Board: Empathy Decline in Medical Education.” I’m going to be an emergency medicine physician, and my medical school career has spanned delivering babies and telling a family their loved one was dying. I’ve acquired a veneer of cynicism for my colleagues, and a layer of emotional armor. It’s that emotional armor that lets me walk away after a patient I’ve been performing CPR on dies, and be able to go to the next room.
There is a well studied phenomenon in medical education: student physicians begin to burn out out early. According to several multi-center studies, burnout occurs in roughly 50 percent of students before they even earn their medical degrees. Personally, this manifests in the fading width of the bright smiles we adorned during our white coat ceremonies while our teeth begin to change to a color that only coffee-executives could be proud of. In short, we begin to care less.
In Chinese, the term for doctor is yi sheng, which roughly translates into “medicate to life.” From this interpretation, the mission of a physician is to restore livelihood to patients, whether in the literal or in the metaphorical “wholesomeness of life” sense. While this may seem intuitive, the ingredients of “quality of life” and “satisfactory care” are much less clear and much more complex.
In the month of January, we have had more cases of measles in the United States than we typically have in an entire year. The reason the United States is able to keep cases of measles so low is because of MMR vaccination. In an ideal world, everyone would receive vaccines so that the entire population would be immune to measles. This way, when someone brand new arrived, their infected state would not have grave implications. The reality is this: there are some groups of the population who cannot receive vaccines.
It has been one month since ringing in the New Year, and already, the United States has racked up more cases of measles than it usually sees in an entire year. The current outbreak, thought to have originated in Disneyland, has expanded to at least 14 states and affected more than 100 patients. Last year, there were 644 reported cases of measles, more than the entire preceding 5-year period combined.
Photography taught me how to see. It taught me to listen using my eyes, rather than my ears alone. This is something that I have carried with me throughout the beginning of medical school. Though some people assume that the arts and the sciences do not mix, photography has actually informed how I envision my work as a physician.
No one can deny the heavy price tag of health care in the United States — in fact, we have the priciest health care in the world. Some might jump to the conclusion that this would mean we also have the best health care, since increased spending means increased capacity to provide a higher quality of care, right? But according to the World Health Organization (WHO), we consistently fall short when compared to other nations in areas like life expectancy or speed of health services.
Congress can be frustrating. Beyond political affiliations and tactical alliances, navigating the actual policies created by Congress can be challenging. This causes many people, medical students included, to write off policy as “boring” or “irrelevant” to their careers. For medical students, nothing could be further from the truth. Everything from services covered by Medicare and Medicaid insurance policies to the types of research funded at the NIH are influenced in one way or another by policy. Inevitably, policy does not always reflect the realities of practice. One of the factors contributing to this disparity may be privilege.
The snow has fully started in Albany. With coldness sprinkling its physical manifestations in flurries, the imminence of winter and another year’s end are tangible. The shuffling students that occupy the classrooms thin as more and more of us choose to study within the warmths of our homes and snuggies. The second year of medical school has truly been a test of endurance and resilience. The two-week themes and examinations have certainly been another challenge to adjust to, many of us exploring and adapting different study strategies in attempt to maximize our time for the ominous Step 1 studying.
Guantanamo Bay. Abu Ghraib. Americans have long been aware that our government participates in torture. What Americans may not be so readily aware of, however, is physician involvement in torture, an issue that came to light in the CIA report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on December 9, 2014. The report made headlines worldwide, prompting world leaders to denounce the CIA’s actions and triggering organizations such as the ACLU to call for a full investigation of violations of human rights.
A winter chill can trigger quite the flurry of activity on the floors of an urban safety-net hospital. Patients trail in from the cold with a telling set of problems: their asthma seems to be getting worse; shoveling caused a worrying chest pain; their toes are changing color; they have nowhere else to go. Senior staff begin wandering the wards, desperate to create room for those in need.
Contributing Writer Emeritus
Boston University School of Medicine
Jacob Walker is a member of Boston University School of Medicine's class of 2016. Jacob's passions can be hard to pin down but lie somewhere in the intersections of geriatrics, infectious disease, public health, and game design.
