Why Medicine Needs You

Stories of pre-medical students knowing they want to be a doctor from a young age has never resonated with me. The critical side of me would argue that when we are young, we are socialized by our parents, teachers and the adults in our lives; adults who implant the idea that doctors and lawyers are upstanding professionals and we should pursue such paths. In speaking to friends and colleagues along their pre-medical journey, it is the stories of mature reflection and criticism of healthcare that I resonate most with, especially those from the multicultural and diverse students pursuing medicine.  Medicine needs a diversity of life experiences, cultural backgrounds, gender identities in their healthcare providers.  It is becoming increasingly more evident that the patient populations we seek to treat are equally as diverse.  If a new generation of doctors desire compassionate and competent healthcare delivery, we must ensure that we stand beside majority and the minority in gender, ethnicity, and ability in the exam room and beyond.

I was born in Paraguay, a country squashed between Brazil and Argentina, two of South America’s meccas of economic and social welfare.  For this reason, many of the native people of Paraguay live in abject poverty.  My biological mother knew the future at hand for me. For this reason, she was unable to provide for me and put me up for adoption.  I say intentionally that she could not provide for me, as I knew she loved me very much.  In fact, she made the hardest decision that any parent could make; she allowed me to leave her in order to find my voice. Due to her compassionate deed, I am able to write this with a coffee in hand, food in my stomach and a roof over my head.  When I was 21 years old, my parents gave me an picture of my biological mother.  I had devoted the entirety of my academic career to studying biology, never knowing or seeing my own biology.  In that moment, I did.  In that moment, as I looked into her eyes, I understood the true depth of her decision to give me up for adoption.  For this reason, I intend to devote my life to ensuring her compassion stays nourished.  Medicine is the mechanism by which I can ensure compassion by aiding in achieving health for the community in which I live.  I am adopted and I belong in medicine.

Along my pre-medical journey, I completed a graduate degree in in San Francisco.  In the city, I met an incredible group of individuals destined for medicine.  Not because they knew they wanted to practice from an early age, but because their life experiences manufactured a desire to improve and advance the health of their communities.  Frequently, these students came from medically underserved groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, some recent immigrants.  These students and their families navigated society and lived life without access to medical care, so maintaining health for their family and community was not absolute.  Observations of health disparities are pronounced in the Bay Area; a freeway may separate two neighborhoods with a 20 year difference in life-span.  In disheartening irony, San Francisco is home to an innumerable health initiatives, medical clinics, and hospitals. These students see medicine as an avenue for advancing the health of their people.  It is the training they desire to give back to their families and their communities.  These are the students who belong in medicine as well.  The doctors treating my family and my community must be the doctors hoisting these histories.

Medicine is a profession driven by compassion.  A patient who enters the exam room may have an immense diversity of life experiences and a provider must deliver competent and compassionate care to them.  It is then a public health measure to ensure that our future physicians and healthcare providers carry a similar unique and diverse life course.  I will leave you with this advice; tell your stories to fellow pre-medical students and write your stories in your medical essays.  Not only does it inspire fellow students such as myself, but these histories belong in medicine.  Medicine needs diversity, and your unique, self-paved path towards medical school will keep our communities sustainably happier and healthier.