Contributing Writer Emeritus
Wayne State University School of Medicine
Sarah is a Class of 2016 medical student at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. She majored in Honors English at the University of Michigan. Her interests beyond medical school include reading memoirs, baking, and travel.
Empathy: it’s what supposedly drives us to become physicians, and what we’re told to demonstrate through our extracurricular activities and during our interviews. We yearn for that perfect patient interaction in which we comforted or understood in a way that changed the patient’s perspective on medical care.
Many medical students made the choice to pursue their career path in their college years or even in high school, and nearly all doctors have chosen their profession by the end of their third decade. These are exhilarating years for young people. These are years where life can seem rich with freedom, opportunity, and, notably, with length. Dedicating a decade to medical training can seem like a choice that, though not easy, represents a worthy investment of one’s youth.
How can doctors-in-training integrate policy change with patient care? Matt, a fourth-year medical student in Philadelphia deciding whether to pursue clinical medicine at all, shares his divergent path through medical school that involved taking two years off. He reflects how his work with the government on systemic health care issues and later in medical communications informed and reinvigorated his work on the wards.
I am an engineering graduate. My rigorous education has taught me that when presented with a problem, I should systematically narrow down solutions to figure out the best possible one. During my second week of medical school I had my first standardized patient encounter. I felt very pleased with myself when I walked out the door after having asked the patient specific questions about her foot pain and been rewarded with the details of her worries.
How can doctors-in-training protect themselves from the competitiveness and negativity often fostered in medical school? Roma, a fourth-year medical student at Jefferson pursuing a career in family medicine, describes how she shifted her goal from getting good grades to fostering strong relationships with patients.
A woman once told me that babies cry at the slightest breeze because that is the greatest level of discomfort that they have yet experienced in their short lives. It is a reminder that we can persevere through life’s tribulations. That we grow from adversity. That new challenges make past trials smaller. That this, too, shall pass.
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.
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.
I’ve realized recently that there are a few things about which medical school teaches you nothing. There’s the fabled four-year curriculum that all neophytes believe will make them into educated, caring, considerate and capable physicians. And then there’s the reality that most of what it is to really be a physician is learned in the “unwritten curriculum,” (…)
The first two years of medical school, for most students, consist mainly of studying from books, lectures, notes and papers. If a student is having trouble understanding the transporters in the kidney, they can read their notes or review the lecture. Later on in medical school, students spend more time on clinical clerkships. If on a rotation a student is told they need to work on their physical exam skills, they can go to the library and check out a book on physical diagnosis. When a lab result comes back on a patient that may be confusing, a student can quickly look it up on the internet.
Columnist
Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University
Alison is a class of 2016 student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson university, and graduated from Providence College with her BS in Biochemistry. In her time outside of medical school she enjoys running, reading, and traveling.
Mind Vitamins
Just like your multivitamin provides your body with the vitamins that may be missing from your diet, Mind Vitamins provides you with resources that may help fill in gaps in your med school curriculum. In med school we learn the scientific aspect of medicine that is necessary to treat diseases, but there are intangible and personal aspects that are necessary to treat the whole patient. This column will enrich your education so that you may be able to better understand your patients' perspectives and treat them not just as a disease, but as a person.
