Contributing Writer
Oklahoma School of Community Medicine
Medical student at University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine in Tulsa, OK.
In 1913, nine years before his death, the physician and medical historian Eugene F. Cordell gave his presidential address to the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland. His topic was the “The Importance of the Study of the History of Medicine.”
When I tell people I am studying medicine and hope to be a surgeon, there tends to be a general agreement that I have made a good career choice, I have chosen a respected, solid field of work and will be guaranteed a “job for life.”
The argument for wrenches on the path to doctorhood is as follows: if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. Students able to memorize the various bacterial growth media will likely remember the drugs to prescribe in an acute myocardial infarction.
First year of medical school: / Don’t remember much. / MD/PhD students, you know what I mean. / Learned how to use a stethoscope.
At first glance, Romée and Veerle appear just typical medical students in Amsterdam like thousands of others. Ask any of their colleagues or friends, however, and they’d tell you that they are anything but.
Medicine has passed through many shifts in paradigms throughout its development, starting from the first establishments of hospitals and medical centers in the 1800s to the human genome project in the early 2000s. Such events changed our perspective on how we study diseases.
This path has been far from cookie cutter, / From being kneaded and rolled / By demanding needs to fulfill multiple roles, / I can’t help but wonder, will I make the cut?
Advice on how to eat is perhaps the most ubiquitous type of medicine we are exposed to throughout our day-to-day. Just look at Dr. Oz or recall the waxing and waning popularity of fad diets. While I struggle to define any sources as legitimate nutrition education, it stands to reason that doctors receive training about carbs, calories and fats, right?
I feel like a child wearing his father’s coat / The starched, fabric seems like a costume
I can finally say I’m in my last year of medical school. It has been a bumpy ride, but only one clerkship, a research project and an OSCE separate me from graduating. I remember receiving my acceptance letter eight years ago.
Since grade school, I’ve been blessed to play sports at different levels. Some were through organized clubs while others were at the local gym or the park nearby. Each sport required that I commit time and considerable effort to learning a unique set of skills. Some placed emphasis on hand-eye coordination, while others required endurance and footwork.
In the spirit of the year of realizing things, I’m starting to think that the med school struggle of knowing/doing/being enough never actually ends. Even as physicians, the problem of “enough” persists, albeit in a form less easily remedied by additional time spent reading First Aid or viewing Pathoma.
Writer-in-Training
University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine
I'm just a dude trying to find my way in the world through (public) health and advancing APIA status.
