I Finished Medical School

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Once you have completed your undergraduate training and received your medical degree, it is time for internship (called housemanship in Malaysia). There will be many uncertainties about which hospital and department you will be placed in, your specialist career aspirations, and how you will balance life outside of work. However, your objective of becoming a good doctor should remain consistent.

To be a good doctor, you must first be a decent human being. The doctors who have inspired me in my career were not just technically capable surgeons. They were also responsible daughters, husbands, and fathers who took care of their own. They were generous in sharing their knowledge and experience, and honest about their limitations. There are many ways to be a decent human being, but some core values that are useful for young doctors are,

1. Having empathy for what the other person is going through

2. Being kind, fair, and firm, for its own sake and not because you would like to get something from the other person

3. Doing the right thing, even when you are under pressure and even when you could get away with lying or not being accountable

To become a good doctor, you must realize that learning is life-long. Medical school equips you with the knowledge and skills to interpret medical literature, laying the foundation for life-long learning. To learn, you have to be exposed to a variety of clinical situations and read around the patients you see. In a 2008 movie called Slumdog Millionaire, the protagonist is a young boy from the Mumbai slums who surprises everyone by being able to answer every question in a national quiz show correctly. He is then accused of cheating and is arrested by the police. During his interrogation, he recounts the various anecdotes in his life that enabled him to correctly answer each question posed to him. He won the quiz show by drawing upon his life experiences, and this was not knowledge acquired from formal teaching. This movie has stayed with me because we learn best, the breadth and depth of each clinical problem when we read around patients - from review articles, textbooks, basic science, history, and landmark papers - and discuss with our colleagues who will be able to provide useful perspectives. This type of knowledge is not obtained from reading lecture notes, treatment guidelines, and answering single-best-answer questions.

There is a certain attitude that accompanies the quest to become a good doctor. It is that the worldly pleasures of life take a back seat during the early years of training. Work-life balance is important when you are older, but not when you are a young doctor and must spend a considerable amount of time at the hospital and your desk honing your craft. I had a young family during my postgraduate training. During this period, my husband and I had no life outside of work, study, and taking turns being the parent at home in the evenings while the other was on call. This is not something we regret because to truly learn and grow, you have to give something of yourself, especially during the early years and it is not forever.

Dr Poongkodi Nagappan

4th April 2025

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