Hello to all the readers out there, and welcome to my blog! I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts and experiences with you all, and I also look forward to your feedback and thoughts. So if there are any questions or issues you’d like me to address in future posts, please let me know.
I think this blog is a wonderful opportunity to speak about medical school and the practice of medicine. What I thought I’d do over the first series of posts is try to address some of the most common questions I receive from high school and college students thinking about applying to medical school and thinking about becoming a physician. Over time, I hope to extend the blog to speaking about life in med school and the issues surrounding medical education, and then towards some of the many issues and challenges surrounding the practice of medicine and issues of health here in the United States and globally. As medical students, we are constantly shuffled and shuttled between the different specialties and hospitals, and as such have a unique view into how the health care system works (and sometimes doesn’t work).
I also hope to share some of the day to day stories I face in med school. It can be a bit of a roller coaster when faced with long hours, experiments that don’t work, and sick patients, but life in med school also has some of the most remarkable and fulfilling moments you can imagine. The intimacy you’re allowed with a patient in a time of sickness, and the opportunity to help them heal and recover, is as rewarding a professional experience as any. It can be as simple as discussing with an elderly lady how taking a simple over-the-counter painkiller more regularly can help with her arthritis. These opportunities are the reason I wanted to go into medicine, and I hope to share some of these stories with you over the coming months.
Over the next couple of posts I’ll try to first speak towards high school or college students, to give you a feel for why you might be interested in medicine and to give you an idea of the paths towards medical school. I’ll also try to explore with you some of the questions I’m addressing through my research in immunology. Science and research are more and more closely linked with medicine through movements such as “evidence-based medicine” (which I hope to discuss later on), and I’ll share how I hope to link my clinical work with basic science research. (“Basic science research” is slang for research on microscopic topics like cells and molecules, while “clinical research” is slang for research that looks at questions about patient care, and “translational research” is even trendier slang for somewhere in between those two).
Looking forward to sharing why I’m passionate about what I do, and looking forward to your feedback. Let the blogging begin!
