A Day in the life of a Physician

Doctors can pursue many career paths, including private practice, university-hospital work, or a job with a health maintenance organization. The first lets you be your own boss. The second offers you the opportunity to divide your work between treatment, research and instruction, in varying proportions. The third means you work for a large corporation, which provides you with patients and handles most of the administrative and business tasks that physicians in private practice have to handle on their own. Doctors can also work in inner-city clinics or in rural areas, where shortages of doctors exist. Doctors can be general practitioners or they can specialize in internal medicine, cardiology, endocrinology, neurology, oncology, sports medicine, or one of the many other specialties. Medicine is a very rewarding profession, but it is hard work. Doctors are often exhilarated when they know they have helped someone get well and devastated when they lose a patient. It is a job that can prey upon you physically and mentally. Since the average patient is not a doctor, physicians must not only be able to communicate difficult, often painful information to those in their care, but also they must learn how to interpret their patients’ needs. They must relate to their patients as people and not reduce them to just the illness that needs to be treated. One element of this is collaborating with their patients to determine the best course of treatment for them as individuals. This requires patience, empathy, and compassion. “Compassion,” said one doctor, “is absolutely necessary.”
Paying Your Dues

In college, enroll in a premed program. Volunteer to work at your local hospital or with the emergency medical services. During your last year of college, apply for medical school and take the MCAT. The four-year program at medical school encompasses clinical work and book learning, with two years in the classroom and two in the clinical setting. Some of the usual courses are pathology, pharmacology, neuroanatomy, biochemistry, physiology, histology (the anatomy of tissues), and gross anatomy (cadaver class). Clinical study takes place at local hospitals or medical practices. Students are expected to offer diagnoses and suggest courses of treatment in real-life situations, although an MD/instructor makes the final decisions. In standard programs, students enter clinical clerkships in their third year and, in their fourth year, they can choose among various elective subspecialties. Students also spend the fourth year applying for internships. After four years, students sit for the USMLE (the medical boards), and those who pass receive their medical degrees. A three-year internship and residency are next, although many specialties require a longer training commitment. A medical education is never truly complete. New challenges and breakthroughs change the medical landscape at an alarming clip. Nevertheless, those initial years of med school have an enormous impact. One doctor we spoke to could name instructors who still influenced his work, more than thirty years after he earned his degree.

www.princetonreview.com

TWENTY MOST IMPORTANT STREET-SMART PRINCIPLES

1. Life is the one chance you get to enjoy yourself.

2. Taking yourself too seriously is counter productive.

3. Thinking that after you die, what you have done will be remembered for more than a few years, is a self delusion.

4. Éveryday is a new opportunity to do what you want.

5. Nothing is really important, and everything is important.

6. The journey is better than the destination, and anticipation is better than realization.

7. For the most part, you are born alone, live alone, and die alone, the rest is an illusion.

8. Don\'t be afraid to open yourself up, look inside and love yourself.

9. A nimble mind is a true source of pleasure.

10. You are going to be hurt, treated unfairly and not always finish first.

11. You have no idea of the value of good health till you lose it.

12. The hardest boss you will ever have, hopefully, is yourself.

13. You and everyone are special in some way.

14. Work on you dreams with all your passion.

15. There really is not a lot of new stuff, it's just how you look at the old stuff.

16. Don't fear being successful and independent you're alone anyway!

17. You are not going to get out of this alive.

18. Always remember, when you walk a dog you clean up after it.

19. Life is a negotiation, without a manual.

20. Nothing is sadder than ending your life with "shoulds."

From http://www.lifestreetsmart.com/principles.html

Good Doctor (4)

Compassion underpins our own emotional response to the work we do. Good doctors should have compassion for patients, colleagues and themselves.

Communication underpins our ability to interact with others. Good doctors need these skills to respond appropriately to patients, colleagues and institutions.

Competence underpins our ability to administer care. Good doctors should deliver the right care at the right time in the right circumstances. Good doctors should know the limits of their competence and how to access appropriate competence.

Capability is a recent concept proposed by Fraser and Greenhalgh 1 in an educational context. Good doctors should have the ability to adapt to changing environments and cultures in a sustained dynamic way. This allows good doctors to mould the three C’s above.

A good doctor will be different things to different people at different times. A static model of “good doctor” is likely to become an albatross around the neck of the profession.

No conflict of interest.

Reference: BMJ

Good Doctor (3)

• When oncall, eat when you can, sleep when you can. Never think it’s too early for bed, just because it’s 8 pm. You never know when that pager will go off, and if you’ll get to see the callroom again for the rest of the night
• You’re human. You’ll screw up (I still do). Learn from it. Forgive yourself for it
• If you have to, use the Hide-In-The-Bathroom-To-Cry trick. I’ve had to employ that several times in my internship. Remember, even the worst day ever will eventually end
• You’re going to be (almost) perpetually tired for the entire year. Life goes on outside the hospital, so have a balance. Have a social life, even if you don’t feel like it
• Never piss off the nurses. If you do you’ll never get a good night’s sleep. There is never an excuse to be rude or obnoxious
• Nurses may not have had the training you have, but they’ve had the experience. If they ask you to come to the floor because a patient doesn’t look well, come stat!
• The learning never stops. Having said that you’ll have way too many journals to read, and soon they’ll stack up and will only make you guilty. If you have a 3-month old medical journal you haven’t already read, you probably never will. Get rid of it. Pick and choose the type of journal and article you’ll read, get rid of the rest
• Lastly, never say no when a consultant offers free food or coffee (no, seriously)

Good Doctor (2)

1. All doctors treat, but a good doctor lets nature heal.

2. Physicians do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.

3. Nature, time and patience are the 3 great physicians. Bulgarian proverb.

4. Foolish the doctor who despises the knowledge acquired by the ancients. Hippocrates.

5. As we get involved in the emotional healing of others, we get healed emotionally ourselves.

6. That physician will hardly be thought very careful of the health of others who neglects his own. Galen.

7. The fact that your patient gets well does not prove that your diagnosis was correct. Samuel J. Meltzer (1851 – 1921).

8. The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty – not marble floors and foundations. Martin H. Fischer (1879 – 1962).

9. To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all. Sir William Osler (1849-1919).

10. All knowledge attains its ethical value and its human significance only by the human sense in which it is employed. Only a good man can be a great physician. Hermann Nothnagel (1841 – 1905).

the sense of being foreign and unwelcome

Good Doctor (1)

All other articles are written by "good doctors". I thought it would be useful to have opinion of a "bad doctor" too, so I decided to write from my own experience. Making a good doctor is a complicated for the system and painful for the trainee.

A good doctor is the one who is considered to be good by his consultants. To reach this goal he should;

1- alway accepted wherever his seniors say,

2- always ask the question the consultant knows the answer of

3- never challenge on any issues with the consultant

4- always make sure colleagues, managers and nurses are happy, whatever the circumstances

5- never blow a whistle

6- if you do not know the answer to a question, never say I do not know, always make it up or just talk around it. In a worst senario just say I am not too sure.

7- never try to change things around yourself just go along the stream

8- never do an audit result of which is damaging to the department or the hospital

9- always prescribe whatever your consultant likes

10- in one word be a "sheep", always follow.

It is desire (and a litte bit of talent, maybe)

If you truly believed you didn't have any artistic ability, you wouldn't have any desire to paint. It's that desire, combined with persistence and the systematic learning of painting techniques, not talent, which make an successful artist.

"Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it at 50."

“What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.” – John Ruskin