Medicine careers

I have a new love in medicine!


Every time I study a new area of medicine I fall in love with parts of it and always ending up considering whether I could be a doctor in that area...

"Hmmm....this is really interesting! Maybe I could be a cardiologist/radiologist/neurologist/GP/rheumatologist/medicine for the elderly doctor/etc when I grow up!"

(the only exceptions have been surgery! I really wouldn't want to be a surgeon! Not because I would be grossed out with cutting people open, but because I wouldn't like the lifestyle, and I don't think I'd get to talk enough to patients (they are mostly under general anaesthetic!))

Actually, it's the fact that I love practically every area of medicine that really help me know that I *should* be doing medicine.

In those transient moments when I feel it's all too hard and there are too many horribly sinful things in medicine, and it's so much work do I really want to carry on...I'm always helped by the thought that

a- I LOVE working with people. I love speaking with them, I love finding out what's wrong, and I love doing that in a caring capacity as doctors do (e.g as opposed to a psychologist or something).

b- I do genuinely find medicine so increadibly interesting! All of it! The underlying pathology, how patients present with their symptoms, the investigations to find out what is wrong, the management and treatment of the patient. I love all of it! Every patient is exciting & new. You have to be on the ball, ask the right questions, do the right examinations, do the right investigations and choose the best treatments. It is a lot of work, I don't deny it. Medicine is hard not because the information is complicated, because really it's not. Once you know the underlying anatomy, biochemistry and physiology, understanding illness and treatments is pretty simple. But there is just SO.MUCH.TO.LEARN!!
But despite that, I love it!

and as of yesterday I have a new area of medicine to add to my loong list of potential future job options...

CHILD PSYCHIATRY!


It's all about children (& seriously, who doesn't like children?!) (well, aged up to 17...so children & adolescants really) and involves delving into their world (school, friends, parents, siblings, how they were raised, their family structure, their relationship with their parents and siblings, and the relationship between parents, and between parents & siblings, bullying, child abuse) in order to build up a picture of what it is like to be this child, in order to understand why they have the conditions they have (emotional disorder, conduct disorder, speech and language delay, eating disorders, sleeping problems, overactivity, psychosomatic, adjustment reaction, psychosis, overdose, self-harm, coping with chronic long-term health problems).
and then instead of treating them with just pills and medcinines, you can organise family therapies, social work, parental training, school intervention...which I find super interesting because you can really help with all areas of the individual's life, and not just their "disease". I guess all areas of medicine do this to some extent, but a lot less than child psychiatrists.

and you can actually make a huge difference to the future of the child, because they are still young and more psychologically, emotionally and socially maleable (this is somewhat harder to do on the whole with adults)

So yeh...child psychiatry! woohoo!


But I think I will just leave it in God's hands, and plod along till I am actually a doctor (june 2008) and then see what He has in store!