To Be a Doctor

When I applied to medical school, I had some preconceptions about what it was to be a doctor, and many turned out to be false. I wanted to write about one in particular. How many of us, before seeing what medicine actually was, thought of a doctor as someone who could encounter a life-or-death situation and nurse someone back to health? That being a physician meant that a call would be announced overhead on a plane and we'd rush to the side of a frightened, anxious person and be able to diagnose and cure the malady. That we'd stop at a car accident and make some heroic intervention that saves someone's life. Of course, no one goes into medicine expecting that this will be their everyday expectation. But perhaps we have some faint hope that medicine gives us a skill set that is remarkably versatile, spontaneous, and applicable to any situation.

Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Even those in specialties that see a lot of undifferentiated illness, like family practice or emergency medicine, depend highly on the setting and allied health care professionals. Gone are the days that doctors carry all they need in a little black bag. Sure, we can diagnose and name treatments for most things, but away from an acute care setting or clinic, there is little we can do. And how many of us (who are not anesthesiologists) remember how to place leads for an EKG or put in an IV? How many of us know how to reconstitute an antibiotic or make a splint from scratch?

Medicine has evolved into a complex beast, one that requires many different people with complementary skill sets. Though some of us dreamed of that time where as a lone physician we could face everything, we quickly realize that such thoughts remain dreams.