Sunday 21 February 2016

The impact of medicine

Pathology. Who would have thought that I would ever find love in a subject! This subject has made a deep impact on me. There's no subject ever since I was a child that I have loved as much.

Ever since I was small, I have wanted to be a doctor. It was my father who had first instilled this passion in me, and I’m glad that I have managed to carry it forward.

Pathology is the study of diseases, a subject that we read in the second year of MBBS. Each lesson is like a treat to read. The subject begins with the normal, and then narrates possible diseases that can occur at every part of the body. It tells us the potential deviations from the normal that have been discovered already, and of the ways we can fix them with medicines or other methods, some of which haven't even been discovered yet! It is deeply interesting to study about the various functions of the body and how they are altered in the state of disease; everything seems to work in a beautiful clockwork manner. A thorough understanding of pathology is essential in order to become a good doctor, no matter what specialty one may choose to pursue.

Our body is indeed a wonder to behold. Each and every second, there are billions of chemical reactions occurring within our cells. It's nothing but a complex web of electrochemical interactions that give rise to the illusion of consciousness that we identify as “us”. And that complicated web is something which I have partly been able to decipher once I read pathology. Any part of the web can fail at any time, making us fall ill, and the exact mechanism of that is more interesting than you'd think.

Pathology is the basis of Medicine, which is one of the main subjects we will encounter in our final year. Together, these two subjects form the basis of what constitute a doctor’s approach towards the treatment of a disease.

The study of medicine is indeed something that has made a profound impact on me. In the past three and a half years of medical school, I have been introduced to the realities of most of the people living in India. We are posted in the government-run hospital attached to our college, where some of the poorest come to seek medical treatment. I have seen the impact that the death of a sole breadwinner can have on the person’s family. I have seen firsthand how the girl child is still highly unwanted in our society. I have seen people in their near-terminal stages look up to doctors as Gods, for they were their only ray of hope, being restored to normal health by prompt medical care.

There is a quote I had read somewhere which has forever stuck to me and made a big impact on me. It cautions doctors saying that patients do look up to us as if we're God. The problem starts when we begin to believe in it ourselves, too. A doctor must always be aware of his vulnerability, the fact that he is only a tool of nature that has made the task of restoring others to better health his profession; he is by no means infallible and superior to anyone else.

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.

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