Ideology as a doctor

saludosa

New Member
5+ Year Member
Joined
Jul 24, 2017
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Hi there, I'm an incoming 9th grader for the pre-IB program; vastly undecided as it comes to careers, surely a dime a dozen occurrence on the forum, haha. I volunteered at a museum for science most of this summer, and am planning on a high school program at a veteran hospital for the next.

For anyone who has studied or is currently studying, any field of medicine, I would like to know how greatly your ideology affected your decision to do so. Of course, there has to be some degree of that for most - why else, barring money? The field is pretty tied with the idea of saving lives. But how much does that affect your psyche on a day to day basis?

You can guess why I'm asking. I'm certain I'm not a great candidate to save lives, but I want to devote myself to helping people... I want to ask whether today, the theory still matches the practice. Is it more humanitarian or a job as much as an office clerk?

Thank you very much for your time!!

Members don't see this ad.
 
It's a job with big pluses and big minuses
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
Hi there, I'm an incoming 9th grader for the pre-IB program; vastly undecided as it comes to careers, surely a dime a dozen occurrence on the forum, haha. I volunteered at a museum for science most of this summer, and am planning on a high school program at a veteran hospital for the next.

For anyone who has studied or is currently studying, any field of medicine, I would like to know how greatly your ideology affected your decision to do so. Of course, there has to be some degree of that for most - why else, barring money? The field is pretty tied with the idea of saving lives. But how much does that affect your psyche on a day to day basis?

You can guess why I'm asking. I'm certain I'm not a great candidate to save lives, but I want to devote myself to helping people... I want to ask whether today, the theory still matches the practice. Is it more humanitarian or a job as much as an office clerk?

Thank you very much for your time!!

The ideology of a Doctor is first and foremost bound by tradition to serve and to do no harm. It is one of the oldest of practices , and one of the most noble of professions. The Doctor has the god-like quality of being able to heal his or her patients, rescuing them from the jaws of death. There is no other profession quite like it. And not many as REWARDING as being ad Doctor.

May you always be motivated, and be empowered !


Regards.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
Saving lives? Naw. Money? Naw.

For me it's an active job that keeps me on my feet and keeps my mind busy. I feel like I'm engaging my knowledge base to the best of my abilities and perpetually learning new things/building on what I know. I like feeling like I'm moving forward and making good use of my time. My past career made me feel the absolute opposite of this, so I appreciate how much I enjoy medicine.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 2 users
You can guess why I'm asking. I'm certain I'm not a great candidate to save lives, but I want to devote myself to helping people... I want to ask whether today, the theory still matches the practice. Is it more humanitarian or a job as much as an office clerk?

Thank you very much for your time!!

What people don't mention on here enough is that as a physician you have a great amount of autonomy. So if you want to treat it like a job, you can. If you want to treat it like a business and set up clinics left and right, you can. If you want to treat it like a calling and provide free services every so often, you can. Being a doctor is what you make of it, just don't do anything illegal or unethical...
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
You can guess why I'm asking. I'm certain I'm not a great candidate to save lives, but I want to devote myself to helping people...

Well to be honest we generally do more helping than saving. I guess you could think of this as slowly saving... but that's what we do much more than rescuing from the jaws of death as someone put it. Sure I shock people out of deadly heart rhythms and intubate them so they don't suffocate to death. But I spend much more time stitching cuts, treating minor infections, prescribing anti nausea pills for stomach bugs, referring to specialists, splinting fracture ect than I do doing the later. It is still gratifying, just not as exciting as the jaws of death thing.obviously the amount of acute saving will vary by field.

I want to ask whether today, the theory still matches the practice. Is it more humanitarian or a job as much as an office clerk

It's a job. It's just that it's a job that comes with a lot more responsibilities, stress and emotional baggage than being an office clerk.
 
Last edited:
It's a job. It's just that it's a job that comes with a lot more responsibilities, stress and emotional baggage than being an office clerk.

I disagree that its just a 'job'. Being a Physician is a calling.
 
There's a lot less "saving lives" than you think. Unless you count catastrophic trauma, which is a very small percentage of what doctors deal with as a whole, there are very few problems that take a person from perfectly healthy to nearly dead, and allow them to go back to perfectly healthy with appropriate intervention. There are, however a lot interventions that you do preventatively. If you put a 40 year old on a medication now that will make that person live to be 85 instead of 75, did you save their life? I guess you did... in a way. That's a far more common way of "saving lives" in medicine than what you see in prime-time drama shows.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user
Agree with Levo. The idea of "saving lives" is a very narrow view of what medicine is. It's really a field of persistence and hard work in a usually non-dramatic fashion. Keep all of your options open and find the thing that stimulates you intellectually. Something that will provide eventual professional satisfaction. If that happens to be in medicine then great. If it's in another field, even better. Cheers.
 
I'm certain I'm not a great candidate to save lives, but I want to devote myself to helping people... I want to ask whether today, the theory still matches the practice. Is it more humanitarian or a job as much as an office clerk?
First off, don't stress that you're in 9th grade and don't know what you want to do with your adult career :) You've got eons to figure that out. Second, there's a vast array of professions that involve being devoted to helping people. It all depends on which avenue of helping you find that fits your interests, skills, personality, and other priorities (e.g., need for routine or diversity, need for a regular schedule or preference for a crazily varying one). They're probably all going to involve some paperwork; I don't know any med/psych/social work professionals who have figured out a way to avoid that. But there are lots of professions that will allow you to help people including those in social/psych realm that are largely about helping improve quality of life, and as others have stated, even a lot (perhaps most) medicine is about improving the quality of life and not simply "saving" it.

You may want to check out O*net (O*NET OnLine) for some career exploration. You can search by professional areas to explore specific jobs and detailed descriptions of what the jobs most typically entail.
 
Top