Advice from a Professional Doctor, Asher Nitin.
Ignore all the portrayals of life in medical school by your pre-med lecturers. If they begin a med school narrative with, âMy nephew is a doctor and he told meâŚ,â instantly disregard it. His nephew did not tell him that. He told him much more. Those are merely the parts he wants to remember. If it isnât a recently-graduated doctor telling you what life in med school is like, it isnât going to be anything like what they will tell you. So what is it like instead? Greyâs anatomy? House, M.D.?
Neither. Med school is more like Scrubs and The Knick than it is like Greyâs Anatomy and House, M.D. Unlike Greyâs Anatomy, you and your fellow medical students will not be that good looking. You will not sleep with each other as much. You will not cry over your patients (youâll have a hard time remembering their full name). And you will not monkey around with barely-tested experimental procedures. Ever. If you do, itâll probably be the last thing you do because good-bye medical school. Unlike House, all medicine will be diagnostic. Your professors will only appear to be brilliant (itâs really just decades of specialized knowledge and experience; with their subject and with your type). Diagnosis will be algorithmic, and even that algorithm wonât be your own. But you will still get a kick out of it. Like Scrubs and The Knick, your medical school will be your life. You will eat, sleep and dream medicine. Your entire social circle will consist of your colleagues. Your family will be the one stable point in your life. Youâll date your colleagues.
Speaking of dating, your sexy does not go up when you become a doctor. I mean this practically. Theoretically, Iâm told doctors are hot. I can see why. They undeniably have inherent value: social standing, (the promise of) money, proof of intelligence (actually, no) and actual power over life (more than you know). But practically speaking (especially if youâre male) your dating life will not get better as a medical student. That is because the demands of medical school will swamp you. You will come home tired. Your pool of prospective partners will mostly consist of your medical colleagues. So while your newfound status as a doctor might have value in non-medical circles, it will mean nothing because you will almost never frequent those circles. But within the circle youâre in, your status as a medical student means nothing, because so what? Everyone is one too. âBut Asher!â you say, frantically gesturing at me to pause, âIâll be smart and date outside of medical school.â No, dummy. Youâll be a dummy if you do that becauseâŚ
The more friends you have outside of med school the harder it is to excel. Med school is about an ethos. Youâre not just part of a course. Youâre part of a community. This is now your primary identity. All your self worth are now belong with us, bi*ch. There is this neurological phenomenon seen in people trying to study. When youâre focused on something, if you break off and engage with something unrelated, your brain takes up to twenty minutes to fully refocus on the original task once you return to it. In life as well, broadly speaking, Iâve observed a similar phenomenon. Iâve known three students in med school whose circle of friends mostly lay outside of med school. One hung out with mostly dancers and choreographers. One was a socialite. One hung out with the sons of politicians. They all were (and still are as of now) the worst doctors I have ever seen. This is because they constantly take breaks from the ethos of medical life. They miss out on the rhythm of life in the world of medicine. So you should know thatâŚ
You will leave most of your old friends behind, and you wonât even mind. Of all the various professions, Iâm told, physicians tend to default the most on school reunions. That is partly because they donât have the time, but also because they donât care. It isnât that we become arrogant or unsocial. It is that the act of medical education deeply changes you. It makes you more functionally intelligent. It makes you less prone to fake drama. It makes you calmer in crisis. All these after-effects will permanently drive a wedge between you and many of the people you used to know. This is a surprising side-effect no one anticipates; least of all your elders. And that is an amusing paradox. They anticipate your becoming a doctor because they know medical school is elevation. They donât realize the side effect of this elevation is you will now talk down to them.
Your most important subject in pre-med is physics. Look, pre-med isnât really about information continuity. The organisms you will dissect in pre-med will be phylogenetically disconnected from med school. You dissect a plant stem, a plant root, an earthworm, a cockroach, a frog, and then⌠a human being? See? You wonât be seamlessly connecting domains of knowledge. Pre-med isnât even about building a conceptual base. Many things you learn in pre-med biology will be repeated in so much greater detail in med school that your prior knowledge will only partially help. Pre-med is about picking up mental skills you will need. Letâs talk about those.
You need to learn to form a train of thought fast. The great thing about learning to solve problems in physics is that you learn to solve problems in general. You learn to quickly identify variables and constants. Sometimes there will be constants in the problem that would normally be variables in real life. You learn to work with those too. Physics allows you to become mentally agile with concepts. If you get fluid mechanics, you can handle the physiology of hypovolemic shock. If you get lever mechanisms (in different orders), you can handle applied anatomy in orthopedics. If you get optics, you can handle a lot of neurology and ophthalmology. In my experience, the students who have the hardest time in med school are the ones who didnât learn to think on their feet within a fixed framework of time.
You hate memorizing? Actually, you donât. Itâs all about the context. Literally none of us salivated at the prospect of memorizing taxonomies. We hated it and struggled over it and were glad when we were done with it. That was because it was something we knew we would never use. In med school, you will do a lot of memorizing. But you will enjoy it (or at least you can, if you choose; Iâm a huge nerd). Many doctors will tell you how easily drug classifications embed themselves in their brains. This is despite the fact that the latter are more complex than zoology taxonomy charts or botanical floral formulas. The difference is that your knowledge of drug classification will impact what you will say to your aunt when she confronts you over her persistent back pain over Christmas dinner (poor posture, itâs always poor posture; she sits like a potato). So you will memorize a lot. It wonât be anything like memorizing was before. Rest easy. You will find it easy to like it.
Your persona does not matter. Caring for people and being compassionate and wanting to cure disease are the least important things in medicine. You need to be able to meaningfully link vast amounts of information to come to a correct diagnosis as per established algorithms. You need to perform surgical procedures within a reasonable amount of time with a decent degree of success. All else is secondary. When most of your non-doctor relatives tell you that a doctorâs personality matters, theyâre doing something called argument from ignorance. You see, the world of medicine is so big and so complex that most of it is technically incomprehensible to the general public. So they latch on to the few aspects of a doctorâs life they are mentally capable of understanding (and commenting upon; remember their first reaction to meeting someone with an education superior to theirs is to give them tips). So they will talk about a doctorâs personality because it is the only part they can presume to have some expertise on. Even that they do not. Donât ever do stupid things like falling in love with your patients or building deep and personal relationships with your patients. You will never last in medicine. This is not because the emotional trauma of losing them will wreck you. This is because you will go bankrupt fighting lawsuits accusing you of patient preference. You will feel the pressure in the things non-doctors will say behind a good doctors back. âHeâs so boring at parties, he can only talk work stuff.â If that is your destiny, so be it. Own it. They find you boring? So what? You were not put on this earth to entertain the illiterate at parties. You were sent here to be a lifesaver; not to have a personality that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Iâm telling you it does not matter. The practice of medicine is life on the edge of reality. All personalities are welcome because medical school is a personality in itself.
The materialists among us are taught the value of wisdom and the ascetics among us learn to knot a Double-Windsor.
The atheists among us will pray frantically and the religious among us will find no time for church on Sunday.
The loudmouthed learn to whisper in the NICU and the soft-spoken learn to yell, âStat!â in the ER.
The type-A personalities among us learn to break the news of a patientâs passing to his relatives and the type-B personalities among us learn to argue medico-legal cases.
The clumsy among us learn to suture wounds and the nimble learn to administer CPR.
Materialists. Ascetics. Atheists. Theists. Loudmouthed. Soft-spoken. Type-A. Type-B. Clumsy. Nimble.
In medical school, we all meet in the middle.
PS: Photo not mine. Credits to the rightfully owner.Â
