...She sounds like an extremely sheltered and naive girl who thought of medicine as some sort of cinderella fairy tale happy ending. Almost as if med school was supposed to conform to her life and expectations not the other way around. You have to work long hours in med school?!? Studying isn't always fun and interesting?!? I can't spend every weekend with family and friends?!? Residents will correct my mistakes and criticize my work?!? I can't spend an hour connecting with every patient and learning their life story?!?
...
Its easy to have "empathy" when your whole worldview is filled with unrealistic expectations of med school, residency, and practice.
Then you come to find out that you're not the smartest person in the room anymore, you have to work hard to pass classes. You have to sacrifice time with family and friends. You have to give up some of the things you loved doing before med school. You have to spend long hours in the hospital including weekends and holidays doing a mostly thankless job. You have to accept the fact that you don't solve most of your patients' problems. But most of all, you have to learn the hard way that you don't make a difference in most people's lives.
Welcome to the real world.
So oddly enough, I kind of see this. A lot of people go into medicine without a good idea of what its like. Its not rainbows and puppy dogs, healing everyone you touch and always knowing the answer. The way some people talk, you'd think they 100% believe that's what being a physician is like.
I do think that some empathy is lost. There's a hardening, an increase in cynicism, and a loss of patience that occurs in medical school. Even in pre-clinical, you start to feel the latter. There's so much to cover, and you get used to skimming or filtering out the junk for what's really important. You expect the world around you to be like that, but it isn't, and if you act like that it just comes off as a coldness rather than focus.
I don't agree that medicine is just a job though. You can get a job anywhere. I truly believe that there is something that can be said about being there for people during something as frightening as an illness, even if its only 2-5% of the real work you do. I see docs that are there for others in ways that I doubt they even understand. They aren't doing it for the money, because who would put up with all that?
That said, some docs actually are punks, and not just robots. I'm
hoping my revulsion of the idea of being a punk, my at least cursory idea of what being a doctor is really like, and my constantly questioning wife that makes self evaluation a pre-requisite for almost every action will all prevent me from becoming the soulless, bitter doc that I've seen too many of my friends become.
While I think having life experience helps in a way with relating with patients and maybe noticing social nuances, I think what annoys traditional premeds in med school, is that non-trads air a moral superiority that all of the trads gunning during preclinical years will get our comeuppance in MS-3, when red carpets will be rolled out for the nontrads due to their impeccable ability to work in teams, problem solve, etc. as stated by Shjanzey. It truly overstates the role of the MS-3, when fitting the hierarchy is imperative and to which non-trads have difficulty doing bc they don't like taking orders from someone younger than they are. It's quite hilarious, if not sad.
I don't know, maybe its because I didn't work directly in medicine, but in a science field as well as another field completely unrelated to medicine, but I have no problem with the idea of the bolded. Maybe because I automatically assume that the med student above me, let alone the resident, knows more when it comes to treating/dealing with patients than me. Who cares how old they are if they're further along in the process than me?
I tend to agree with EMDO on non-trads being easier to get along with. None of them have shoved the "I HAVE LIFE EXPERIENCE" down my throat, and they seem to be less gunnerish
I've met a couple, but they tend to be the ones that worked as mid-levels. Even amongst those people though, there's the subset that actually knows how things are, but doesn't feel the need to "show" they know it, and then there's the people that think they know how things are, and go out of their way to "demonstrate" knowledge that they obviously don't have.
You'll be surprised. Some non-trads, especially those who came from an allied health field (nursing, EMS, techs of various sorts), generally think they have things figured out. Some of them are downright unteachable or do stupid crap like pimp fellow med students in front of attendings (despite knowing jack ****) or try to do stuff solo without telling their residents/attendings. They are generally less gunnerish (as stated above), but are irritating in their own unique way. Being aloof and acting like the clinical years are just a formality is just as bad as acting like the clinical years are Thunderdome.
"TWO MEN ENTER, ONE MAN LEAVES!"
