Feeling to become a doctor

Feeling to become a doctor

A doctor is a medical professional who helps diagnose and treat patients who are suffering from illness. Doctors work with patients when they are sick. They also may work with healthy people to help them achieve a physical goal, such as improved strength, cosmetic changes, administration of vaccinations and better nutrition. There are many reasons become a doctor.

I believe doctors can help sick people feel better. Doctors alleviate patient suffering and make them feel better. A patient who has been feeling poorly because of lymphoma can go to a doctor and get treated with chemotherapy. The chemo can help the patient feel better soon after the medication has been administered. A doctor can help a woman safely birth a baby and make sure her reproductive health is preserved after the baby has been delivered. The best doctors therefore are equally right and left brained individuals who balance the orthodoxy and tradition of medicine with an originality and inventiveness. Hippocrates, the greatest physician of his time rejected illness to be caused by superstitions, evil spirits and disfavor of the gods but believed in a physical and rational explanation. Doctoring is never just a 'job', it is a way of life catalyzing the wonder of healing.

My mother first gave me Cheerios when I was nine months old, challenging me to pick up tiny bite-sized donuts from a high-chair tray in our New York City kitchen. Eating Cheerios can be like microsurgery for nine-month-olds, as they master the hand-eye coordination to connect thumb and index finger to dry Cheerio and then Cheerio to mouth. The Cheerios were part of a set of age-appropriate developmental tasks my mother presented to me, based on the writings of child psychologist Arnold Gesell, who wrote that eating Cheerios refines fine motor skills.

My early exposure to Gesell's ideas, first as an experimental subject and then as a research assistant after my brother was born, began a lifelong interest in how experience shapes development. How, I wondered, did a child learn to grasp, to walk or to speak? Later, as I tutored elementary school students, I faced the same question, wondering how countless repetitions turned a blank stare into comprehension and then excitement about a new idea. Practice made a difference -- but why? And how?

I began to explore these questions in biological terms during my freshman year at Duke. In an ...