hi darksmurf and neuroprotector,
i'm a first year med student and i'm hoping to spend my summer in shanghai doing some type of clinical or research work. my spoken chinese is good, but reading is minimal. could you guys share how you were able to secure your shadowing/research/work positions? any help would be appreciated. thanks so much!
My school has funds set aside for a number of students to go abroad each year after 1st year for 'research'. So I got together a little basic science project through some contacts at my school who had some contacts in China and got a project together. The project itself didn't really pan out to much because, as you can image, you can't accomplish much in 5 weeks.
My real purpose in going back to China (where I lived for more than 4 years) over that summer was to find some expat docs and find out what they do. When I lived in China before, I never went to the doctor. I just did some internet searches before I left and found expat hospitals in the area where I was. I had some bit of luck in that I noticed that one of the docs at one of the hospitals did her residency program at my school, so I contact that department at my school, got her email address, and got in touch with her. I asked if I could come shadow and she said that would be fine.
I think, though, if you just used the contact information on the website for the doctors and asked to come shadow they would likely be open to it. When I did go shadow this doc, there was a rising 2nd year student from a Canadian med school doing some kind of 4 week externship there or something. So those are possbilities, I guess, depending on your school.
I must say, however, that my experience shadowing was a bit...deflating. The doc I shadowed was very candid and opened my eyes to a number of challenging issues that I would face practicing even with expats in China, much less at a local hospital.
Here's a summary:
1) She felt as though she couldn't trust the lab results that she got. Unreliable lab results are hell.
2) It would be very difficult to support any type of specialist with the expat population. OBGYN, general internal medicine, and peds or family medicine are most in demand. Those specialties don't appeal to me.
3) You don't have reliable support. At a teaching hospital in the US, you trust the radiologist and the other specialists that you get consults from. She had numerous harrowing stories about consults with local docs that were wrong at best and dangerous at worst.
4) The doc I shadowed had only recently finished residency. Normally, in the States, she would have probably joined a practice with more experienced physicians and continued to learn. As an expat doc in China, she didn't really have many other experienced colleagues to turn to when she encountered a problem.
5) Compounding the problems in 3 and 4, she found that she was asked to manage problems that were beyond the scope of her training because there weren't other reliable specialists available locally. For instance, managing some neurological complaints that she would have referred in the US. Now, for some folks that might be fun, but considering that she is a young physician, trying to manage complex problems outside her area of expertise was frustrating.
All in all, the message that I left with was that practicing in China would be most viable and rewarding for a general practitioner of some sort that had been out of residency and in practice for about a decade and who would enjoy challenges. That was disappointing for me because I don't want to be a general practitioner and because I don't want to wait 20 years from where I am now before I get back to China.
That's probably too much information, but I guess your question just got me going.
If you have any other questions about it, go ahead and PM me.
DS
