As a third year med student who openly dislikes Medicine for its focus on treatment rather than prevention, I still all too often get asked how to get in. While this is a fair question that I had also asked, there are much more important questions to be asking which I’d like to address in this post. I think that while Medicine is truly a good career for some, it thoroughly doesn’t deserve the attention that it gets, and that many of the hard-working students applying could be far better off without it. As a disclaimer, this opinion post was written as a counter-argument to all the hype around medicine, but I’m very open to hearing different opinions than mine on the topic which desperately needs more discussion.
Firstly I’ll start off with why I chose to do Medicine, a set of reasons which may share some similarities for your own motivation to apply for Medicine, despite many denying it when being asked face to face. I “liked” the sciences, as almost every single Med interviewee will tell you, even though by “liking”, I really meant that I was getting good grades for it rather than anything else. Then there was the “helping people” aspect, which I didn’t realise meant absolutely nothing – almost any career is there to “help people”, a rubbish truck driver helps people have clean homes, a mechanic helps fix peoples’ cars, a businessman helps deliver a needed service to people – helping people is a universal aspect which really doesn’t narrow things at all. I was also a competitive academic in High School, and the trend at the time was for the top academics to go after Medicine – a bizarre phenomenon, but I sadly joined in and wanted to be a part of this “elite” group.
And finally, there was the all-too-important money driver which significantly influenced my decision, often sugar-coated by applicants as a “stable”, “professional” or “highly rewarding” career. Although I had already heard that there are much faster and easier ways of making money than medicine, I was still misguided about this thanks to the “average pay” statistic on the Careers New Zealand website.
Like many others though, I recognised at the time that these aspects each individually wouldn’t justify choosing medicine, so I argued that the intersection of all these desires was what really led me to Medicine. This however does not narrow down the options to Medicine at all – “liking” science was just natural curiosity that we all have but helped with good grades, helping people is central to almost every career, doing something because of its “elite prestige” is simply being a blind follower, and more money can be earned faster in many other careers (the explanation for this misconception is that medicine, with its competitive entry program, selects the hardest working students at the beginning, creating a selection bias of only highly successful people in the career, boosting the “average pay”, while this selection happens in most careers after graduation based on performance at work. So while average pay can deceive us into thinking that Medicine is more financially rewarding, it’s really explained by this selection bias, and that the same hard-working, motivated individuals are likely to earn more elsewhere.).
I now no longer care for any of the above mentioned aspects, and the one question I really would have liked to ask was “What is my core purpose?”. You may have already come across this from the popular inspirational TED Talk, but to actually be able to answer the question is scarily difficult. I unfortunately wasn’t able to answer this at the time, and if I had, I wouldn’t have chosen to do Medicine. I’ve gradually formed my core purpose of maximising my positive impact on the world, where I quickly realised that traditional medicine couldn’t possibly help me achieve this considering its obsession with treatment using more pills, surgeries and equipment to help treat disease rather than prevent it, while also focussing on the individual rather than the big picture population.
This has together led to a sub-par health system which is incapable of dealing with modern issues such as the huge obesity epidemic despite having some of New Zealand’s most disciplined, hard-working individuals in the medical field. As pre-med students who have come this far, you too already form a part of New Zealand’s most disciplined, hard working students. I would argue that these traits would often be far better placed in other areas of society that are desperately short on talent – public health and health management being examples in the health sector – rather than entering the already crowded and competitive medical field where you are even unlikely to get a job by the time you graduate (especially with the ever-increasing medical student numbers).
So as you wait for offers into Medicine to come out, have a think about what your core purpose is, and whether that aligns with your desire to do Medicine or not. I only write this post out of appreciation for all the immensely motivated and disciplined students I have met in pre-med and medicine, out of a desire for each of us to impact the world as positively as we can with our skill-sets rather than simply accepting to become powerful cogs in an inefficient system.
Either way, all the best in your future careers, I’m sure that every one of you will go on to do great things in the future, and I hope that this post from an alternative opinion will at least get you thinking more about your career decisions. Whether you agree or disagree with what I’ve said here, I encourage you to comment below and share your opinions on this important debate!