Student Article – November 2019
An Open Letter to Medical Students
Enrique Alvarez-Ventura, OMS-III
The workload of my first two years of medical school completely overshadowed everything else in my life. This included my reason for wanting to be a doctor in the first place. Studying for classes and exams and then doing it all again, seemingly without end, made me feel jaded. I became unappreciative of this opportunity to meaningfully impact my patients' lives. Thankfully, something changed when I started my third-year rotations. My whole attitude towards medical school completely transformed and my goals and aspirations to become a doctor were reignited. Having the opportunity to actually sit in a room with someone in need, knowing that I could help them, jolted my senses. The feeling of connecting with a patient is unexplainable; believe me, I’ve tried to put it into words, but I can’t. Looking back on the first two years of medical school, I have realized that I couldn’t help patients without them. As bad as I make the first two years sound, I wouldn’t change them for anything.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the same wonderful experience with his or her rotations. Talking to my peers, I started to get a sense of the struggles third years are coming across. Some feel underappreciated or unhelpful, and the reasons for these feelings vary from person to person. For some, these feelings arise from a lack of interest in the specific field or conflicts with staff. For others, it could be because they believe they aren’t doing anything meaningful during a given rotation. I would like to take this opportunity to remind my peers that it is our responsibility to make the best of each rotation. Even as a student doctor, patients listen to what you have to say, and you have an opportunity to make a positive impact on their life.
As we all know, the first step to stopping a disease is preventing it from happening in the first place. Patient education is one key way of preventing disease onset, and we as medical students are uniquely qualified to guide our patients on the right path. Unfortunately, our preceptors are on a limited schedule and don’t always have the time that is required to tackle such important topics with each patient. As a medical student, I have found this is a good way to be useful; having the time and using it to better help a patient’s understanding. Not only does this help the patient, it also helps us medical students to solidify our base knowledge of disease processes. We can ultimately make an impact on someone’s life, and it goes way beyond simply telling someone to improve his or her diet.
To be able to reach out to a patient in a way they will learn from you takes some practice. It deals with being able to understand where the individual is coming from, giving them the resources to change their habits and doing it all in a nonjudgmental and caring way. For example, asking them about their exercise regimen, and going above and beyond and asking them why they can’t walk around their neighborhood. It could be due to a safety concern, lack of sidewalks, lack of available time, or being physically unable to. Once we find out the limiting problem, we can connect patients with community resources that might meet their needs and then explain why this will help their overall wellbeing.
If you can find meaning in what you are doing, using this method or any other, you might find yourself enjoying rotations in specialties that you can’t imagine yourself going into. In enjoying out rotations, we can hopefully reduce the risk of medical school burnout. The most important takeaway here, though, is the fact that you are giving a patient the opportunity to improve their wellbeing and prevent negative outcomes in the future. At its core, that’s what being a doctor is all about; taking advantage of and learning from every opportunity possible and then using that newfound knowledge to help our patients improve their lives.