Rural Rounds

It seems that no one ever stops to think about doctors actually being patients themselves. The patient is the one who needs to see a doctor, who is healthy and will make you healthy. But doctors are also human, just like their patients, and just as vulnerable to ill health. In fact, most aging doctors are already patients themselves to another doctor, who in the midst of treating their patients may be seeing their own doctor on the side for anything from diabetes to high cholesterol to hypertension. How does it feel to be on the other side of the system? For most of us, we probably know what it feels like to be on the patient side, since most of us aren't doctors. As a medical student, I know that I as well as many of my class have had those "hypochondriac moments", where we suddenly believe we've discovered signs of terrible illness in our own bodies. We know just enough to be dangerous. Luckily it is just our own wild imaginations taking one minor symptom of a disea...

In my junior year of college, I had the opportunity to shadow a family doctor for half a week. Sitting in his office one day, looking at his medical school degree, I noticed the degree read “Doctor of the healing arts”, or something similar. At the very least, I remember clearly that it read healing arts – and not medicine. When people go to the doctor, they generally expect that the doctor will have the answer for their problem. The doctor is the expert, and is the person to go to when you have a medically related problem you need taken care of. For many people, health care is a lot like any other service industry: consumer driven. The fact that the service is on me, rather than on my car, my house, my back deck, computer, etc., only makes it more personal. In the end, I have a problem, I go to the expert, I get it fixed, and I pay the expert. However, just like the service industry, if the service rendered is insufficient, doesn’t fix the problem, or worse still, damage or destroy th...

Sometimes you find that you're right where you're supposed to be. That might be the right city or town to live in, or it might be in the right kind of relationship with the right person. Maybe it's as simple as the right place at the right time, and events around you seem to be working solely for your favor. For me recently, it is finding that I am heading in the right direction on that oh-so difficult path known as a career. Wait, I'm going to have to admit something here first. I just spent about 15 minutes coming up with that catchy opening. Don't worry though, at least a third of that time was in retyping it after it suddenly disappeared for reasons known only to...well, no one really. Alright, now back to telling you just where I'm going with this new blog of mine. My name is James, and I'm a first year medical student at the University of Missouri - Columbia. I just graduated college this past May. It was in college, between my first and second years, ...