“The purpose of education is not simply to learn facts, but to acquire a relish for knowledge. Give medical students good methods, and a proper point of view, and all other things may be added as experience grows.”
– William Osler
If you have not understood the quotation given above please do not continue. Read it again.
If you do not know who Sir William Osler is, please read about him too. He lived a century ago but his methods in the art of medical learning echoes until today.
All right now that I have received your attention, firstly I want to congratulate The Young Columnist Project (YCP) under the Malaysian Medical Gazette flagship. It is an excellent initiative to get Malaysian Medical and Allied Health students throughout the globe to contribute their articles on wide variety of subject.
Their articles speak for themselves in showcasing our talented students who do not mind penning down their thoughts and share their aspiration as well as their deepest fear with us all. The challenges they face everyday regardless of whether they are studying locally or abroad are tremendous which require patience and perseverance against all the odd.
With that in mind, I am writing this article to them and this is not because I am the most qualified to do so but having read their articles, I could not help but to empathise with their daily predicament. Hence, this piece comes from the depth of my heart.
Dear students and young people,
As you read this, please consider this as a friendly chat with your senior or even as a brother whom 20 years ago had walked the same path as you are taking now.
It was difficult for me when I left Malaysia for Auckland at the age of 18 years old, and this was not just the transition into university life but emotionally speaking as well. At times, we can be at lost as our families and best friends are thousand miles away. In other words, the whole support system we grew accustomed to is now gone. We are thrown to a foreign land where the people speak in different languages and practice an unfamiliar culture.
To some of us this also marks the rite of passage since living independently now encompass every aspect of our lives. Simple logistics that we all have taken granted before like accommodation, groceries, paying bills, cooking and finding Halal foods for those who are Muslims are now ours to deal with entirely.
This ordeal even becomes more challenging to those who are studying in the non-English speaking countries. Well I cannot even start to imagine the difficulties of learning medicine in a foreign language and communicating to your patients who do not understand what you are saying. A good example was an article written by a YCP medical student who had to learn Hindi from scratch. She did it “One word at a time” and to me that was phenomenal.
Unfortunately, of late we have heard many stories in newspaper articles and online blogs bashing your seniors who had just graduated and currently working as junior doctors or Housemen in Malaysian public hospitals. Allegations that they are not ‘safe doctors’ and do not possess minimum standard to practice medicine in Malaysia have triggered a sense of distrust among patient who seek medical treatment. These accusations are especially targeting the graduates from Eastern European and certain medical schools in Russia. I am not going to discuss who is right or wrong or whom to be blamed. What I am interested in discussing is what shall we do about this.
So, should you be worried? The answer is YES you should and you should do something about it. For those of you who are directly effected by this please do not be disheartened. Take this as a challenge. Turn the tide around, for this is your moment to shine and prove to the skeptics that they are wrong. So work hard but above all work smart.
Although there is some truth that medical schools are important in providing good syllabus and clinical training. But I guarantee you that in the end, it is the student factor that win the End Game. Passion over everything. The more time you spend in clinical rotation the better you get at picking up important clinical signs and sharpening your diagnostic skills. No CT scan can pick up early ischaemic strokes, but the human eyes and hands will pick it up anytime of the day.
If you stay true to yourself and the reason that brought you into this world of selfless duty to mankind in which at the wee hour of early morning you are mending someone’s broken bones or suturing a gaping wound to stop a bleeding without any worldly intention, then I promise, you will find the reward trusted deep into your souls. May God bless your deeds with His own special rewards.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
If I may share with you my own experience as a specialist in charge of supervising House Officers in a Klang Valley Hospital. Over a period of six month, I came across five cases that were labelled by the committee as disciplinary issues, lack of enthusiasm and some even required psychiatric evaluation (i.e. depression). Upon further questioning I came to realise that they were smart students back in school but did not performed well as Housemen as they had chosen wrong career out of families’ wishes. Their hearts were not in medicine and therefore they could not sacrifice their lives in exchange of long working hours. Fair enough to say that the shift system was not implemented effectively in some hospitals. Lots of improvement are needed, nevertheless those Housemen were simply not interested in working as doctors. They were doing injustice to both their patients’ and to their own lives in the end.
If you are among the few people in this world who happen to discover what you want to do with your life while you are already stuck in a wrong course (think Steve Jobs) and that medicine is not what you wanted, then stop fooling yourself. Do something else that is meaningful to you. Do not continue for the sake of someone else’s dream. Take another field and chase your own path. There is no point of pursuing medicine if you are not in it 100% because sooner or later you will grow discontent against everyone and even worse with yourself. You do not need to prove to the world anything or owe it to anyone to make medicine your life mission. Your parents might have given you the paintbrush but remember that ‘Life is an empty canvas’ so draw your own paintings.
Please do not get me wrong, it is not my intention to demotivate any one of you out there. I am writing as someone who had been there and witnessed my colleagues who were smarter than me in pre-university with passion for engineering but were forced to take up medicine and pay the price of flunking medical school after 4 years of painstaking sacrifice.
On the other hand if you are entirely sure that this is what you want. Then by all means give it all you have. I never said it is going to be easy, but I promise you it is going to be worth it.
When it comes to sitting for examination, well everyone has their own learning style. Don’t get to worry if you cannot match your classmates grades. Studying in college is not JUST about getting good results. It is also about finding what else is this world that you can dig your hands in and enjoy. For example doctors in the States have second degree like arts etc. Take up hobbies may it be language, arts or photograph and do not forget to travel the world. What sets you apart from the other doctor in the room is not whether you know the latest medical guidelines but how you view this world because that will give you a unique insight on how you view the patient in front of you.Lastly, let it be a reminder to us all that whenever we feel the journey is long and hard, it is then that we must not give up. As one of my favourite teacher, Professor Tim Koelmeyer (a famous forensic pathologist in Auckland, New Zealand: you can read more on this man here written up by my ex-classmate http://lifeinthefastlane.com/the-breakfast-club/#comment-110505 ), he used to tell me, “If this was meant to be easy, then anybody can bloody do it”.
Good luck to all of us.
Dr Beni Rusani is a cardiologist currently based in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. He is passionate about increasing awareness about local health related issues. Read more about him at The Team Page.
[This article belongs to The Malaysian Medical Gazette. Any republication (online or offline) without written permission from The Malaysian Medical Gazette is prohibited.]