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Medical Student: Nilay Patel
29 Plays4 years ago
Season 1, Episode 18: Nilay Patel is a third-year medical student at the University of Tennessee. Listen to Nilay discuss the shortage of primary care physicians and the electronic medical record.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:09
Speaker
You're listening to The Wound Dresser, a podcast that uncovers the human side of healthcare. I'm your host, Jon Neary. Today, my guest is Neelay Patel. Neelay is a third year medical student at University of Tennessee Health Science Center, College of Medicine. He received his bachelor's in neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2017. Neelay, welcome to the show.
00:00:38
Speaker
Hey John, thanks for having me.
Impact of COVID on Medical Education
00:00:41
Speaker
So we're just starting to get into 2021 here. And obviously the COVID pandemic has been going on for a long time. And I imagine that's had kind of a large effect on your medical education in 2020. So can you just describe, you know, some of the changes that had to be made in light of what was going on with COVID?
00:01:05
Speaker
So I was a second year medical student when the pandemic started. So I guess around March of 2020 is when all of this kind of came to the US. And actually, it's affected every year of medical school differently. So as a second year, I was just finishing my didactics for that school year.
00:01:31
Speaker
getting into studying for step one, which is our first board exam that we take at the end of our second year. So it didn't really affect my school very much, but it did affect when I was able to take step one, which I don't know if you've talked to other medical students about step one, but it's kind of like the beast that's looming over your first two years of medical school.
00:01:56
Speaker
So generally what happens is you get a six to eight week dedicated study period, which I was just getting into when COVID hit. And so there was kind of this uncertainty on whether we would even be able to take the test and kind of two, three weeks into my dedicated study period when you should have 100% of your concentration on studying for this massive test
00:02:22
Speaker
kind of over our shoulders, we were like worrying about whether we'll even be able to take it with this huge pandemic that's happening. And what ended up happening is the test centers actually closed and people's tests got delayed and delayed. I was originally scheduled for April and ended up having to take it in October. So in the middle of my third year, which is kind of unprecedented,
00:02:50
Speaker
usually you have to take the test in order to start your 30 year medical school, but today's obviously, or this year's obviously an exceptional year. So they had to make some exceptions. So even as I understand, even before COVID, there was this like trend in medical schools, which my cousin, he's a, he's an older physician. He's like 50 years old now. And we, when he heard about this trend, it was kind of bizarre to him that
00:03:16
Speaker
students don't really attend lectures. They kind of just go through, like you said, like the didactics on their own. So is this something that is basically preeminent at University of Tennessee? And could you just like elaborate on how that sort of affects the educational experience of just kind of doing everything sort of on your own, as opposed to a lecture setting?
Structure of Medical School
00:03:41
Speaker
So that is one of the kind of misconceptions about medical school is that the first two years are purely lectures, just like you would imagine undergrad being. But it's a mix of anatomy lab first semester for us, which is obviously in-person and required. And then we have different clinical teaching sessions, maybe once or twice per week that are required and in-person.
00:04:09
Speaker
just on the lecture side, some of them are required and some of them, and all of them are recorded and you can watch them at a later time, but some are required to be attended in person. So it's not like you're in your apartment for a week at a time, just grinding through these lectures. You'll have a couple, two or three times where you'll have to go to campus to do in-person sessions.
00:04:37
Speaker
Can you also talk about the structure of your clinical rotations? That starts in, like you said, your third year, right? And how are you sort of, you know, what's your sort of workflow? How are you assessed during that time, et cetera? So there's seven core rotations that every medical student does during third year. Let's see if I can remember them all right now. Pediatrics, OB-GYN,
00:05:07
Speaker
medicine, family medicine, surgery, psychiatry, and neurology. So those are the seven core rotations that every med student does. And those kind of lay the groundwork for getting exposure to many different specialties in medicine. And then during your fourth year, you kind of have more freedom to decide what more you want to pursue in your junior internships and so forth.
00:05:37
Speaker
So right now I'm working on my core rotations. I've done pediatrics. I've done half of my OBGYN rotation. I've done neurology and psychiatry and I just finished internal medicine and I'm about to start family medicine. So I've gotten a pretty wide range of exposure to two different specialties. And like I said, every medical student does go through these. So it's, it's nice to kind of,
00:06:07
Speaker
see things that you might not have been exposed to in the past during your shadowing or any other previous experiences that you've had. In terms of being evaluated, it's kind of a mix between clinical evaluations by your attending positions during your rotation and the shelf exam, which is the exam that you take at the end of every rotation. And that's a standardized exam put on by the NVMe.
00:06:37
Speaker
that every med student takes at the end of their core rotations. So you kind of get that same standardized test evaluation as well as how you are with patients, interacting with patients, interacting with the medical team and with your attending physicians and things like that. So it's a little bit different from how you're evaluated from the first two years, which is purely based on your test scores. Yeah, can you talk more about how
00:07:07
Speaker
You're in a clinical setting, but you're still a medical student. So what are some of the boundaries that are set of things that you can do and can't do, things that you can tackle or other things that perhaps your attending physician has to take care of? So I guess I can speak more to the medicine rotation because that's just what I came off of, but obviously it's a little bit different for whether you're inpatient or outpatient and what rotation you're on.
00:07:35
Speaker
But for medicine, since it is pretty general, I guess it can broadly apply to most of the other rotations as well. So kind of like taking you through a day of what I did as a medical student on the medicine rotation. We would get there in the morning around 6 a.m. and we would be assigned three to four patients for the day that were on our team. And we would go talk to them, see how they did overnight,
00:08:03
Speaker
see if there were any changes overnight, any problems. And then we would kind of lay down the plan for today. And kind of what we were working towards and you know what medications they're taking and then obviously asking if they have any questions about their hospital stay and how it's going.
00:08:25
Speaker
And then after that, we would kind of discuss what we got, what information we got from the patient with the residents. So the residents are kind of like the first line, the first people that we kind of go over the plan with. They're like our main partners as medical students. And then after discussing with the residents, we'll go on team rounds with the attending. And the attending will, actually before the attending goes into the room,
00:08:54
Speaker
as medical students present the patient. So during COVID, it's been a little bit different. Sometimes we do table rounds where we just kind of sit in the office and go over the patient list and we present there. Normally what would happen is you would go around to each room and present outside of the room or inside of the room in front of the patient. But it's kind of been varied since COVID is very real right now.
00:09:20
Speaker
So we would present the patient, go over our assessment and plan for what that patient is going through for the day. And then the attending would either agree with it or add something, and then we would all go into the room and talk to the patient together. Kind of in terms of what we as medical students can tackle, that's kind of one of the gray areas and one of the fine lines that you have to try to maneuver because obviously,
00:09:50
Speaker
we're in training, we're not doctors yet. So we don't know 100% about every disease process or every medication. And sometimes patients have very specific questions that we're not in a position to answer. And so, you know, about simple things such as like hypertension, diabetes, if they are questions that we feel comfortable answering and that we feel we have
00:10:19
Speaker
the adequate knowledge to answer, then we certainly can. But some of the times we kind of have to defer that to either the residents or the attendings and kind of just say, you know, try to bring that up when we come back with the attending and the resident and then go from there. Yeah, you've done a pretty great job painting a picture of kind of
00:10:46
Speaker
what's involved with your, your medical education. So we've talked about your didactics step one, now you're in your clinical rotations, you're going to be taking step two. And then, so where in that whole timeline do you kind of contemplate and put forth, uh, your, your, you know, choices for a specialty. So that kind of comes in.
00:11:12
Speaker
at any point during your medical career, I guess, some people come in knowing they want to do orthopedic surgery or neurosurgery, or they want to be a GI doctor.
Choosing Medical Specialties
00:11:22
Speaker
And that's great. And a lot of the times, they do end up doing that. But oftentimes, what I've heard anecdotally from other medical students and other doctors is that they come in thinking they're going to do one thing and change their mind about 10 times and end up being something completely different.
00:11:42
Speaker
But in terms of the timeline, during your fourth year is when you really have to decide. But during your third year, I think, is when you're going through your core clerkships, is when you kind of fall into one category or the other, whether that be medicine or surgery. And once you've decided that, then you can kind of start to narrow things down as you experience them during your rotations. And then during your fourth year,
00:12:12
Speaker
Like I said, you have more freedom to decide what rotations you want to pursue further and kind of explore further. A tangent to that, I think a big trend that's prevalent in medicine is the shortage of primary care physicians.
00:12:34
Speaker
Just being a medical student, have you noticed that people are sort of steering away from primary care or people are giving you feedback to either do primary care or not? Have you kind of seen the evidence as to why there is a shortage of primary care physicians during your medical education? Yeah, and I think a lot of it is primary care, the compensation is generally a bit less.
00:13:04
Speaker
Um, and there's less glamor in it, um, as well as people don't really want, uh, to end up treating, you know, like hypertension and diabetes. I think it's maybe kind of boring or kind of mundane. They want to do, you know, quote unquote cooler things, um, in their medical career. Um, and some of those things might be true. Obviously it's a matter of opinion. Um, what people think about primary care.
00:13:35
Speaker
Um, but I think one of the, one of the good things that I have seen is that there are starting to, they're starting to have more programs, um, designed to kind of keep people kind of steer people into primary care. Um, one of the, one of the ones that comes to mind is, um, I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but they'll actually pay for your medical school. Um, if you in, in like in
00:14:06
Speaker
if you trade four years of your clinical time to serving an underserved population, whether that be in some rural area or the VA or something like that. So I think that's one of the, those are the programs that are gonna be kind of helpful to bringing some people into primary care because
00:14:35
Speaker
Yeah, from what I've seen, there kind of is this not negative view, but this people generally just kind of shy away from family medicine and things like that. Most people who do internal medicine want to sub-specialize or do some sort of fellowship afterwards. Have you seen
00:15:01
Speaker
in the workflow of a hospital sort of evidence that say like physicians assistants or nurse practitioners or perhaps some other healthcare practitioner is filling that vacuum where there aren't enough primary care physicians and providing that sort of like you said care for diabetes, hypertension, a lot of common conditions. So I think nurse practitioners and physician assistants and kind of advanced
00:15:31
Speaker
advanced practitioners generally come more into play in the outpatient setting. And so they definitely are present in the inpatient setting, which as a med student I have more experience with. So I've seen nurse practitioners working with the neurology team, working with nephrology, rheumatology. But when you hear about
00:16:02
Speaker
These massive practices of you know like 20 nurse practitioners being overseen by one doctor. Those kinds of things that you see in in the news. Those are those are more in the outpatient setting. So no, I don't really have. I don't really see that too often as a med student.
00:16:22
Speaker
Tangent to your earlier comment about, you know, compensation of primary care physicians, right? Like, according to American Association of Medical Colleges, in 2019, the average debt for a medical student after they leave school is $200,000. So is that something just more like qualitatively? Is that just something
00:16:50
Speaker
you know, you feel like amongst the student body that that's kind of like a big pressure A to like, you know, steer your specialty and B it's just kind of a big, you know, weight on your shoulder that you're, you know, in some way things kind of just have to work out because you sort of have that large sum of debt at the end of the road. Yeah. And I think that's, yeah, like you said, it's like, it's like a weight on the shoulders.
Influence of Debt and Stress on Career Choice
00:17:12
Speaker
And sometimes that's kind of the monster that is, is chasing medical students, you know,
00:17:19
Speaker
and that's what guides their decisions. And it's unfortunate that that's kind of the system that we have right now, and hopefully it'll change in the future. But yeah, I definitely see that, and I definitely hear that when I'm talking to my peers. Hopefully, like I said in the future, things will change, but right now I think that might be one of the, you know,
00:17:47
Speaker
Causative factors as to why there is a shortage of primary care doctors because If you end up in a in a specialty where you're doing procedures like if you do GI or Cardiology or things like that or if you obviously end up in surgery the compensation is much more and you can pay off for that much faster Yeah Yeah, like the the weight on your shoulder is just imagery like hits me right that
00:18:17
Speaker
Cause, cause stress and burnout are already issues within the medical profession. So is that, you know, that's obviously one thing, uh, you know, the financial burden, um, you know, dealing with, with poor patient outcomes, things like that. Uh, do you feel like you're, uh, like UT and general sort of medical education is equipping students with, uh, you know, skills to cope with the stress of the job? Yeah, definitely. And,
00:18:46
Speaker
UT in particular has done a really good job. We have wellness initiatives. We have this kind of department called SASSI. I can't remember what it stands for. I'm sorry. We all call it SASSI. But it's this group of counselors and what we call education specialists that we can go to if we're struggling or even if we're not struggling, if we want to just go over how we study.
00:19:12
Speaker
how we're coping with medical school. We have professionals that we can talk to for free and in competence. And the administration won't know that you're there or what you talked about. And so they have tons and tons of resources for us to kind of reach out and make sure we are addressing every part of our health
00:19:39
Speaker
whether that be our educational health, mental health, physical health, all of those things. And the thing about med school is the thing that I loved most about first and second year was the people, the classmates. Obviously, I've made really great friends and friends that I hope to keep for the rest of my life. And it's unlike undergrad in that everybody is going through the same thing. You're all in the same boat.
00:20:09
Speaker
And you have to kind of support each other through it. And you know what everybody else is going through. So you know how to support them through it. During third and fourth year, actually, during third year, what I found is that, you know, being in different cities, because I'm in Knoxville right now. A lot of my friends are in Memphis doing their rotations. It has been a little bit difficult because I've been away from a few of my friends that
00:20:39
Speaker
have been kind of my rocks during the first and second year. And it's really, you know, put into perspective how nice it was to have them around pretty much every day during the first two years. So yeah, I think it's a combination of things as to how you cope with the stress and potential burnout in medical school.
00:21:04
Speaker
I want to look at just the larger picture of, you know, healthcare in the US. Obviously the big issue for a lot of people is just moving towards like a more centralized healthcare system. I think it's often, often people kind of group that into some, like, you know, some blanket term of like socialized medicine, but there's definitely, I think a lot of different ways about going about
Centralized Healthcare System Debate
00:21:32
Speaker
that. And I feel like in,
00:21:36
Speaker
Correct me if I'm wrong, that doctors in general can be sort of skeptical of, you know, a more centralized approach a lot because of the compensation piece that it might not, the, the, the compensation might not be there with the more centralized system, but you know, younger people in general are for,
00:22:00
Speaker
I believe are for like more of a centralized approach to medicine. So as a young medical student, you're kind of straddling those two lines between being a practitioner and sort of being like a young person in the United States in the year 2020. So do you find that medical students are more into like a more centralized healthcare approach? Yeah, I think as any future
00:22:27
Speaker
Any future clinician who cares for the well-being of others, which I hope all future clinicians do care for the well-being of others, generally want more people to have access to healthcare and have cheaper healthcare. I think that's one of the massive problems in the U.S. and sometimes we compare ourselves to Canada and the U.K. and these
00:22:53
Speaker
these places that do have a centralized medical system. But on the flip side, the compensation is one of the allures of being a physician in the United States. So yeah, how do you balance that? And I think the way I look at it is the system isn't gonna change
00:23:20
Speaker
like super rapidly. It's going to be a very, very slow and methodical change if there is a change. You know, like the average doctor isn't going to start making $200,000 as opposed to $400,000, you know, from one year to the next. And so I think
00:23:47
Speaker
I think the whole fear of a universal healthcare system or socialized medicine, as some people like to call it, is kind of over exaggerated and blown out a little bit, which is unfortunate because I think the idea of it is good and would be good for most Americans. But yeah, like I said, I don't think
00:24:14
Speaker
I don't think things will change super rapidly. So I don't think it's something to have too much concern about. But so you, you would say though, that actual like physicians you've interacted with, not that you're, you know, you're on your clinical rotation, talking healthcare policy necessarily. Like you said, you're talking more about a patient's blood sugar and their blood pressure. But, um, is that, is that fair to say that like the, you know, the,
00:24:44
Speaker
medical establishment is generally against this, and I'm sure they do have a lot of push in our political system and otherwise to potentially steer things away from a centralized healthcare system. Yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say because a lot of the people who do, like you said, have the influence in politics and who do influence policy are of the older generation and have
00:25:13
Speaker
more traditional conservative views. Um, obviously that's a generalization. Um, but yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say. If you were to kind of just, uh, assess our healthcare system in general, what's, what's one thing that's working and maybe one thing that's not working so well. Ooh, that's a tough one. Uh, one thing that's working really well is more Americans have access to healthcare, um, and health insurance.
00:25:42
Speaker
right now than I think ever before. And the cost of that healthcare is a different question, but most Americans do have access to healthcare, which is a good thing. And the quality of that healthcare is generally very good. Now, obviously you have some rural areas, you know, in like central United States and the western part of the United States where
00:26:10
Speaker
the primary care shortage is actually hitting a little bit harder. But for the majority of Americans, I think that's a good thing. One thing that's not working well, maybe the cost of healthcare. You hear kind of these horror stories about hospital debt and people having collections and after them. And I think, like you said, as a younger person, I believe
00:26:40
Speaker
health care is a right, not a privilege. And I don't think people should be being sent, should be like being sent to jail or having collections sent after them just for, you know, receiving the medical treatment that they deserve. Another maybe criticism that I've been hearing a lot recently is just this feeling of, and you might have a more insights into this since you're doing your clinical rotations in medicine and internal medicine and so forth that
00:27:13
Speaker
A lot of times it can just be like they're sort of going through the motions that they have to fill in everything on their computer screen. And they don't really get that, you know, full attention that they would like that, you know, perhaps the visit can only be 15 minutes because the doctor has to see, you know, 40 patients or, you know, within their workday. So is that something that is that in your eyes that you've seen maybe isn't working so well that the patients and doctors aren't
00:27:35
Speaker
you know, when you, when you go in to see your doctor.
00:27:43
Speaker
able to get the full quality visit that maybe either side would like to have. Sure.
Challenges of EMRs
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's really good point. And I'm glad you brought that up because yeah, I have, I have seen that firsthand where a doctor will go into a patient's room during, yeah, like you said, what would be scheduled for about 15 or 20 minute appointment. And, um, for the, for the first five minutes, he'll talk to the patient, um, maybe listen to their heart and lungs.
00:28:10
Speaker
And then for the next 10 or 15 minutes, they'll be clicking on the computer or typing or even dictating into the computer in the patient room while the patient's sitting there, just quietly looking around. Then they'll ask if they have any questions. Sometimes the patients are pressured to say no, don't have any questions, and they'll move on to the next patient. And I think that has been
00:28:38
Speaker
a big problem since the implementation of the electronic medical record system. I think it's been around 10 or 12 years now, since the EMR has been implemented. And a lot of the problems that I see is that the technology is not perfect. It does require a lot of kind of clicking and making sure you're on the right screen and clicking the right things and
00:29:07
Speaker
filling out everything completely. And so that has been one of the challenges of being a doctor transitioning from paper charts where maybe you were just jotting down a few things and checking a few boxes during a visit to filling out these really complicated notes and orders and doing all of these things and still maintaining the same patient load. I heard experiences firsthand from my dad, who's a doctor,
00:29:38
Speaker
He had some struggles going from paper charts to the EMR. And I've seen it kind of firsthand in the outpatient setting. In the hospital, like with, you know, younger residents and with younger attendings, it becomes less of an issue because most residents and attendings don't walk around with a computer.
00:30:05
Speaker
they'll kind of just go into the room and jot down anything they need to and finish their notes and orders outside of the room after they've done talking with the patient. But like you said, there is some of this added pressure of this time crunch and having to put in all of these things in the computer afterwards and whether you'll remember everything and all of these things.
00:30:35
Speaker
So yeah, that's a really good point that you brought up about the EMR. Yeah, I think the EMR, it's just so, cause on one hand you're like,
00:30:43
Speaker
like paper is on the way out, right? So you sort of need something electronic. And the EMR makes my job kind of easy. I'm in research, so I need to make sure that the orders are placed and that they're not billed for, in my case, MRIs. But the criticisms, I think, which some of what you mentioned, right, is that
00:31:10
Speaker
Like sort of, what's nice about paper is there's sort of like a nuance to it. Like you can, you can kind of, you know, articulate like certain things about a patient better on paper, as opposed to like using these preselected conditions or, or, you know, diagnoses through, through the EMR that, that is kind of just designed for, for billing. Right. So it just seems like.
00:31:38
Speaker
It seems like a big point of distress. One physician I was talking to was saying that the EMR is part of the downfall of 21st century medicine. And I think one of the other problems with it is before the EMR was established,
00:31:58
Speaker
we saw it as this sort of holy grail. Everything will be in this one centralized system about every patient will be able to see all their previous visits, all of their previous lab tests and imaging, and every condition that they have. It'll all be in this one spot where we can kind of have a full picture of the patient without having to do a lot of digging or
00:32:22
Speaker
A lot of detective work, right? A lot of detective work, exactly. And requesting records from other hospitals or other clinicians. But it isn't like that. Obviously, it has taken some of the detective work out of it. You know, if a patient has been to your hospital in the past, you're able to pull up previous labs and imaging and, you know, previous physician's notes.
00:32:49
Speaker
if they're not in the same system, you do end up having to do detective work and making phone calls and having records sent over. And it's kind of more of the same that, you know, more of the same issue that we thought we had solved with EMR. And so I think that's one of the main criticisms of it is that obviously it's still young, but there are definitely, definitely some improvements that need to be made. On all the different things, you know, we've touched with healthcare accessibility, the EMR,
00:33:19
Speaker
Um, right. It's part of this, this general, you know, you hear all this noise about like the brokenness of our healthcare system. And I guess now my question to you would be, is that something that, you know, your medical school acknowledges that like our healthcare system is bro, like is broken in a way, or is that something that's kind of, you know, not talked about you're just kind of stick.
00:33:45
Speaker
to your didactics and clinical rotations? Every medical school, obviously, has to train medical students based on what the LCME requires. And there are certain things that every medical school needs to teach their students. Some of these other things, such as addressing the health care system and what problems may or may not
00:34:15
Speaker
It may or may not have other things like social determinants of health, kind of implicit bias, all these kinds of things that are definitely relevant to our futures as clinicians. Those are kind of up to individual medical schools to acknowledge as much or as little as they want. UT has done a great job of talking about
00:34:43
Speaker
kind of the social determinants of health, going through implicit bias, how physicians may or may not be influenced in how they treat their patients, whether they be African-American or Asian or any other race or creed.
00:35:13
Speaker
in terms of the healthcare system and it being broken, you know, we haven't really touched on that too, too much. Um, it's kind of up to the individual student to kind of dive into that as much as, as much as they want.
Balancing Science and Humanity in Medicine
00:35:31
Speaker
When you look at, uh, you know, medicine on the whole, um,
00:35:37
Speaker
I think, uh, one of our previous episodes, uh, Dr. Chidi Parikh, she's a integrative medicine physician at New York Presbyterian. And we were kind of talking about, you know, the art and the science of medicine and science, obviously being, you know, the very, the mechanisms of, of, of, of things that go on your, in your body and the anatomy and how things work and the art being kind of related to the more of the soft side, right? The, the holistic healthcare, the,
00:36:06
Speaker
really seeing the patient as a whole. Do you feel as a medical student that you've gotten education that kind of puts emphasis on both the art and the science of medicine? Most definitely. And I think the first two years of medical school are more geared towards the science of medicine
00:36:35
Speaker
And third and fourth year is really when you learn the art because you're observing residents and attendings interact with patients all the time. And you kind of develop your own style based on people's approaches that you liked or you kind of reject certain methods based on people's approaches that you didn't like. And so- What do you mean by that? Like an approach you would like or dislike? What would be an example of that?
00:37:07
Speaker
So some people kind of, some residents that I've seen, some attendings kind of approach their patients as diagnoses. They don't really take the time to ask about maybe some social factors or some other factors that might be playing into a patient's wellbeing and how they're presenting to the hospital.
00:37:33
Speaker
I can't really think of a specific example off the top of my head, but I have seen actually a few residents who kind of refer to their patients by their diagnoses or their room numbers. They kind of think about these patients as not people, but as diagnoses. And that's kind of one of the approaches that I've rejected.
00:37:59
Speaker
even during our first and second year of med school, we were taught always refer to patients by their names. They are a person who has hypertension. They are not hypertension in room number 12. And so you kind of go in to talking to that patient with that approach. They are a person first and foremost. And so you kind of learn their story, learn what factors might be playing into their disease process.
00:38:28
Speaker
And then you kind of take how you treat their disease process from there. You don't go in with these preconceived notions of why they might have hypertension or diabetes or something like that. Kind of go in with an open mind and see this person as a person first and go from there. Yeah, right on.
00:38:55
Speaker
You don't want to dehumanize any of your patients, right? Most definitely. All right. The last question I have for you here is that people who have, you know, gone into medicine or who have decided to forego medicine, you know,
Work-Life Balance in Medical Training
00:39:12
Speaker
There's just sort of this vibe you get from people and it's something to the tune of like, you know, being a doctor takes a really long time, right? Like one physician was kind of saying to me, you know, if you want to be an orthopedic surgeon, that's, that's 10 years of your life, you know, right there. And.
00:39:31
Speaker
That sort of elicits a sense of, you know, that it's just like a really hard 10 years and that you're forgoing a lot of other things. And like, I guess my question to you is now that you're sort of in the middle of your, you know, medical education experience, is that like, do you feel like you're sort of missing out on other things that you could have been doing, but you've decided to take this long road to medicine? Yeah, I think that is a very common view about medicine is that
00:40:02
Speaker
you're literally wasting your prime of your life. Like your 20s and your early 30s are when your body is at its peak, your mind is at its peak, and you're wasting away your life. But then there's the other way to look at it. And when you were asking me that question, actually, it brought to mind a meme that I saw on the medical school subreddit. I think it was something like, as a med student,
00:40:32
Speaker
I'll be happy when I graduate medical school. As a resident, I'll be happy when I get into this fellowship. As a fellow, I'll be happy when I'm attending. And then as an attending, I'll be happy when I retire. Yeah, it's kind of this, you know, I'll be happy when this next thing happens, or this next thing happens, you forget to be happy now, and to live in the moment. So I think that was a good reminder of just like, appreciate what you have now. It's not like medicine is consuming your life, you know, it's like,
00:41:03
Speaker
as a medical student, I still have free time to do, you know, do what I like to pursue my hobbies. Now, obviously I have a little bit less time than someone who's working in normal, you know, like eight to four, eight to five job. But I think that's, that's the key to it is, is just remember that there's always going to be this next step where you think you'll, you'll have more time or you'll have more happiness or more freedom. But sometimes that,
00:41:32
Speaker
looking forward, that thinking about looking forward makes you forget to think about now and enjoy now. All right. On that note, it's time for a lightning round. A series of fast-paced questions that tell us more about you. So, Neelai, first question I have for you. What grosses you out at the hospital? Terrible smells.
00:41:57
Speaker
I'm sure there is no shortage of terrible smells at the hospital, right? Yeah. All sorts of bodily fluids. How do you, I guess, has the mask helped with COVID in, you know, sort of minimizing that trauma? Most definitely, but sometimes when you're using your N95 that was meant to be used for, you know, one or two days and you're going on like two weeks of using it, it loses its effectiveness.
Coping with Medical School Stress
00:42:23
Speaker
Altoids, baby, Altoids.
00:42:25
Speaker
What is your go-to strategy for coping with stress? Um, rock climbing. Um, I, I recently gotten into rock climbing, um, as a first year medical student. And in Memphis, there's this awesome gym called Memphis rocks. Um, and so every time I was, every time I was feeling stressed out, I would just go rock climbing. I had my whole climbing friends group who I would always run into at least one or two people when I was there. And it kind of got my mind off of medical school.
00:42:54
Speaker
Cause it can be, it can be hard to kind of get out of the bubble of medical school, um, during the first couple of years. Cause you're always thinking about thinking about school, always studying with your friends who are in your class or the class below or above you. Um, so, so being at the gym was definitely that thing for me to kind of get away from it. Besides rock climbing, I also understand you've been hitting the links a little bit. Is that correct? Uh, yes, I have been.
00:43:22
Speaker
getting back into it since my middle school days. So, uh, what is your, uh, favorite, uh, club in the golf bag? Ooh, it's gotta be four or five iron. I think four iron. That's pretty uncommon, I would say. Yeah. I can't hit wedges. I can't hit my short irons, but somehow my long irons just, they just go. Well, that's a, that's, that's definitely a club I struggle with. So maybe you'll have to give me a lesson on that. I hate the driver.
00:43:51
Speaker
drivers in the dog ass, right? What is the medical specialty you hope to pursue?
Deciding on a Medical Specialty
00:43:58
Speaker
So right now I'm thinking about either radiology or internal medicine and potentially GI after internal medicine, but still deciding.
00:44:09
Speaker
Nice, you can come and hang out with me at HSS Radiology. Lastly, what was just the biggest surprise for you thus far in medical school? So I think I wasn't surprised by the workload because everybody who had gone through it before kind of prepared me for that. And obviously there's, hearing about it is different from actually going through it.
00:44:37
Speaker
but I was surprised by the amount of free time I had and the amount of time I still had to kind of pursue my hobbies and interests outside of school. So I would definitely say to you as someone who's hopefully starting med school soon, don't think about it as consuming your life because it definitely won't. And you have to kind of consciously try to step out of it
00:45:06
Speaker
of the medical bubble as often as you want. It's all about that work-life balance, right? Definitely, definitely. All right. Niele Battelle, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you, sir. It's been a pleasure.
00:45:30
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Wound Dresser. Until next time, I'm your host John Neery. Be well.