Being on psych this month, learning and reviewing all the psych diagnoses, you can’t help but fearfully self-inspect for psychosis, personality disorders and
the like. Look what I learned in school today: I’m a schizoid narcissist with passive-aggressive tendencies and a history of anxiety problems!
I’m really enjoying psych, and I wonder if it’s because I can relate to some degree. I think most of my classmates enjoy it, but some just don’t,
and perhaps it’s because they’re just not neurotic enough, or don’t have a good sense of how challenging life can be with mental health problems.
Just a thought.
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An attending told us today in our first psych lecture, “Medicine is not about stamping out disease, it’s about helping people.”
Boy have the days of medical school applications passed.
No longer do I try to figure out how to rephrase “I want to help people,” and fit it into a 500-word essay. But along with it went the whole initial
notion of medicine–that is, a profession built on helping people, improving lives, easing suffering. Now for me it’s about turning a patient’s
story, signs, and symptoms into a diagnosis, and then figuring out what to do for that diagnosis. Sure, often the goals overlap–but in the end, I’m not
out to relieve suffering, I’m out to cure disease.
I expect (or hope?) that this will come back to me once I get the whole “diagnosing and treating” thing down pat–hell, a large part of the reason I
write this blog is to remind me and others of the important stuff, because it’s just so damn easy to forget.
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