Medical school has been one hell of a ride! From anatomy classes and spinning in a Bárány chair to auscultating heart murmurs and helping deliver babies, it really has been a special 6 years.
If I were to do it all over again, there’s honestly very little I would change, if anything. With that, here are 6 things I’ve learnt over these past 6 amazing years.
1. You will never know enough
Medical school has a funny way of making you feel both incredibly knowledgeable and completely clueless.
You can spend weeks learning about a disease, pass an exam on it, and then meet a real patient who reminds you how little you actually know. There is always another presentation, another complication, another drug interaction, another paper that changes what you thought you understood.
I’ve gradually stopped seeing that as a failure. Medicine is simply too large for one person to know everything. What matters is being curious enough to keep learning, and humble enough to recognise when you don’t know something.
2. Discipline gets you further than motivation
There are plenty of days when you don’t feel like studying.
There are also plenty of days when you’re tired, overwhelmed, bored, or questioning why you are learning the fifteenth classification system for something you will probably never remember again!
And yet, you learn to do it anyway.
Six years of medical school has made me realise that discipline is much less glamorous than people make it sound. Most of it is simply showing up repeatedly, even when you don’t particularly want to.
Sometimes you study because you’re interested. Sometimes you study because you have an exam tomorrow. Trust me, you will have a bit of both, and it will keep you going!
3. Be brave enough to be stupid
This is probably my favourite lesson. Medical school gives you an almost endless supply of opportunities to feel stupid. You don’t know the answer to a consultant’s question. Forget something you were certain you knew yesterday. Misinterpret a physical examination finding. You say something confidently and immediately realise that it makes absolutely no sense.
At some point, you have a choice.
Being willing to ask a stupid question is often what separates the ones who learn a lot quickly from those who do not. Being willing to admit that you don’t understand something is also much safer than pretending that you do.
Medicine has made me realise that looking stupid for five minutes is a small price to pay for knowing how to save a life in the end.
4. Medicine is ultimately about people
It is easy to forget this during the preclinical years.
For a long time, medicine can feel like a giant intellectual puzzle. You learn mechanisms, memorise pathways, go through differentials and try to work out what is happening inside someone’s body.
Then you spend enough time in the hospital and realise that the person is much more complicated than the disease. Patients are scared and frustrated. They have families. They have jobs they can’t leave and don’t always understand what you are telling them. Sometimes they don’t want the treatment you think is best.
And sometimes what they need most is simply for someone to listen properly.
Being a good doctor therefore isn’t just about knowing what to prescribe. It is knowing how to explain something frightening, how to speak to someone who is angry, and how to make a person feel that they are being taken seriously.
5. You learn a lot from people
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Robbins and Cotran. It is the best book I have ever opened.
However, some of the most important things I’ve learned in medical school weren’t taught in lectures. They came from watching doctors.
I’ve had the pleasure of observing the consultant who manages to calm an anxious patient with just the right words, the resident who knows when a patient is too embarrassed to share their real symptoms, and even the doctor that knows exactly when to just be completely silent.
Medical school has made me realise that part of becoming a doctor is simply observing the people around you and deciding, consciously or unconsciously, which parts you want to take with you.
6. It’s fiscally irresponsible
Years of studying while your friends in other fields have started working, earning money, travelling, buying things, and generally behaving like functional adults. Meanwhile, you’re still paying for textbooks and trying to remember what this heart murmur means.
Then you graduate and discover that the reward for all those years of studying is… more studying.
Residency. Courses. Conferences. Certifications. More exams, books and more years of telling yourself that eventually you’ll be financially comfortable.
I’m kidding (mostly). Being a doctor is not about the money. It truly is a calling, and if you’re lucky enough to be called up, I believe there is nothing more gratifying than being able to help people the way doctors do.
When it comes down to the profession, Indonesia might be a different story to the rest of the world. I will write more about my thoughts on where I think healthcare is headed in Indonesia in an upcoming post, so stay tuned!
For now, that is all from me! What do you think of the medical degree and how it’s gotten to where it is now? Let me know in the comments below. Till next time!
– Verrel
Featured image by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash
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