The New Doctor

Well, I'm back. Not in full force, not quite yet. I'm still getting classes, work, sports, and other commitments figured out in such a way that I can settle into the elements of a day. Watch, I'll just be getting the hang of things and then the semester will end and then they'll go and change things on me again! But that is because college isn't strictly about book learnin' any more. If that is what you think it is then enroll in an online institution and go live in a library carrel in the back stacks somewhere. You'll make lots of old, dead friends that way, but that won't help you relate very much to the living. Of course, if you're a lab-e then you might find yourself feeling pretty smug about now with that "hands-on" approach best known as straining-one's-eyes-under-a-microscope-to-look-at-cells-preserved-in-formaldehyde. That won't make you too many friends either. Not the real live kind.

More and more I care about people, and less and less about theories that don't work, or even one's that work but don't take the whole person into account. If I were on the pre-med track, you would not catch me - not in a thousand-million years, not if you paid me a thousand-million dollars - running the losing race of the bio/biochem major. It just wouldn't happen. The plan to study lots of tiny cells in a lab so that I can study lots more tiny cells in the  bigger and better labs of med school, so that one day I receive a stamped piece of paper that brings ill and broken people to my office day after day...whoa! who said anything about people here?! I thought I was dealing with capped scenarios and testtube experiments, problems that had answers, not emotions.

But that is not the kind of doctor I would want to be.

Sadly today, most angsty pre-med students I've experienced have become or are becoming that doctor. They get all their A's in school, but can't handle it when a real person walks in the door with perhaps multiple issues, all in need of address, including support from other human beings. They can't face another person's crisis with understanding compassion, only with astere lab data because that is what they know - the science, the cognitive, the reasonable, the rational, the tidy little bundle of facts that leads to a conclusions. They have not got the background to help the whole person, which is what really needs help, not just fragments, the whole person.

Since when has medicine involved looking out for the patience whole well-being? Since someone got smart and realized you can't cut off a limb and treat it. Every part is linked to another part which is linked to another part which in turn touches the source. People are not robots. They are not segmented creatures capable of compartmentalizing themelves completely. They need a new kind of doctor, one who looks at the being as a whole unit and takes every aspect into consideration; one who understands the link between body, soul, and spirit. The new doctor needs a broader education. More than a link to people, he needs an avenue, a bridge the size of the Golden Gate, to allow him to connect his medicine to the outside world in a way that will truly be effective. He needs to understand other cultures, know history and economics, develop a critical eye as well as mind, participate in a team experience, know good writing, produce good writing, attempt to understand the creative arts. He needs to dive in and take a swim in something other than formaldehyde if he wishes to be trully effective in his practice. He needs to see where someone else is coming from and he needs to know how to cross discipline bounds and find where they interweave, because they do. No discipline stands alone.

A person who can disperse the idea of these imaginary barriers and find a way to understand the world (their patient) as a big picture made up of lots of small puzzle pieces, will be the new doctor. The person who lives beyond the realm of Latin terms and ideal test tube scenarios can be that doctor. The person who is focused on the patient rather than on lab procedures is that doctor. They can mend body, soul, and spirit.