Taking it Home

Personally, I have never been a huge fan of Doctors. No offence. Even when I was younger and aspiring to become one, I had never made it a habit to shoot off to the GP's office at the smallest indication of a fever and a sorethroat. Not that I've had the worst of experiences with doctors when I was a kid. I wasn't particularly sickly or weak except for a bad bout of sinusitis and infections when I was 11-ish which actually went away with age (or which Barbara's dad managed to cure - who knows ;)).

But even now, being the medical student per se, I'm still one to opt for self-diagnosing rather than running off to see a Doctor. This is where I've come to realise, after reading a bunch of med articles online, that I have become one of those medical students who are on the complacent end of the globe. To put it simply, I think that freaking out over 'something small' is overreacting.

This becomes more evident when we take our medical knowledge home. Ethically, a ton of benefits and dilemmas come about from diagnosing your friends and family members. Maybe because we deal with a different set of emotions when it comes to someone who hits close to the heart. We either laugh it off with a joke or two and try to write it off as nothing serious, for some, because we would rather live in denial than deal with the fact that there might be something actually wrong.....or we overreact and put a ton of paranoid thoughts into everyone's heads simply because we want to be extremely cautious about the person we love, and want the best for him / her.

I think I have fallen into the former group most of the time. Having had a dose of practice recently, I have been sticking true to my guns and wiling myself to behave rationally. Fairly. Logically as in any other situation with any other patient. I am generally not a worrywart, as I have told Niff, but I do tend to enjoy being in denial a fair bit of the time. I probably do make a very bad example of a patient. Gasp. Hahaha.

I could probably write up a 'Notes on Denial'. About how I would rather write off every health glitch that occurs in my family and with my best friends as a non-pathological thing, and recommend 'Mind Over Body', because the thought of them being ill, or even worse, losing him / her, is overwhelming as it is. I'm sure that alot of the time, my closest friends can vouch for how I would rather choose the easy way of denial out rather than dealing with reality. Like it was with hpy. Like it was with alot of other things in life that actually mattered to me.

But at the end of the day, medicine is medicine. We are trained to consider ethical issues and the potential benefits or detrimental effects of our actions before we actually recommend diagnoses, management options and the whole lot.

Whoever said being a medical student was dull? Like Leslie mentioned the other day, a couple of years into your field and you start analysing things a completely different way then others. Rewarding, it is. At the moment though, for myself, I'd still go with my self-diagnosing and self-medicating ;)