#fiveyearsurvivalrate

Hi TNQD, I really love your blog and enjoy reading them and I also get motivated by all the advises and inspirational quotes you wrote. I have one question though, since you are in med school now are you expected to know everything? like I know there are so so many diseases, terms, medicines or parts of the body and I know some of them you can even forget. Is it normal for a med student to "NOT" know the answer? I hope you get what I mean and hoping you would answer this one. Thanks so much! :)

I think this is the perfect time for me to be answering this. 

Today we received a deluge of information about muscles, nerves, vessels of the limbs and back and it honestly felt like it was too much to take. Ever since coming to med school, we’ve been force fed information faster than our brains can digest it, and every time it seems like we’re just getting the hang of it, they pile more information on top of us. You’d think that after all this, we’d know everything, but the truth is that we don’t. 

So the answer to your question is no. We are expected to remember and know A LOT of things, but in no way are we expected to know EVERYTHING. Medicine is vast. One of my doctors once told me that you could open a medical dictionary and find terms and diseases you may never encounter throughout your entire career. There is just so much that it’s unreasonable for one person to know it all. It’s probably the reason why specialisations exist, and why an ENT doctor won’t know everything that a cardiologist might and vice versa. 

On the bright side, if you’re looking for a career where you’ll never be done learning, medicine sounds about right.

Is cheating a problem in medical school? I'm in high school and I'm looking to go into a pre-med program, but I keep hearing horror stories coming out of places like Johns Hopkins that scare me a lot. (My old high school was such a cheating ****fest it was ridiculous, it was one of the main things driving me to depression, and I don't want a repeat of that experience again.)

Hi there.

I think that wherever you go in life, there will be people who will do anything to get ahead and it’s a problem that’s not going to be limited to the medical profession. As far as I can tell, cheating doesn't appear to be a problem. You're far more likely to see people pouring over textbooks in the library than thinking of clever ways to cheat. I'm sure there has to be a few students who do, but, medical school is about learning to become a good doctor. If you cheat in an exam, is that going to help you treat a patient in the future? Conversely, if you don’t cheat on an exam and get a lower grade than someone who does, does that make you a worse doctor? I think it makes you a better one.

Having a sense of integrity is something that’s really important as a health professional. If you’re okay with cheating on a test, who’s to say you might not fudge the numbers on a patient’s chart or fool around with drug prescriptions in the future?

I know that it can feel pretty awful when someone who doesn’t deserve it gets a better score than you, but that shouldn’t deter you from picking medicine. If you’re doing what you love, everything else is just icing on the cake.