Besides Medical School...

This afternoon, I was titillated to receive my ticket to a certain music festival that will feature the above, My Morning Jacket, among others. The neck mashing mahem is quite admirable, I believe. Thinking on my festival plans (including some plans I won't share with my mother or you) I realized how socially normal or even above average I consider myself and nearly all of my premed friends to be. Is this an aberation? I had been told for years that medicine and science were reserved for those willing to sacrifice personhood. Outside of medical TV dramas, phycisians are often seen as pale, single minded gunners who speak a different language.

Maybe we've gotten a bad rap from PhDs slaving away in the lab. Maybe there is a stigma towards those who do well in the classroom. I mean those people must be losers, right? Maybe actually getting into the clinics will drag out any socially relevant mores straight out of my little brain. There's probably a mixture of all of these influencing opinions.

I must say that fellow applicants at interviews, students I met, and future classmates at revisit blew me away. I know there is the prospect of being crushed by the system, but at this point the people who I will call my peers are absolutely superb, and not simply from a medicine point of view.

There is precedent for phycisians breaking the mold. Howard Dean and Stephen Joseph Bergman (aka Samuel Shem) are a couple of phsicians with expanded interests and influence. With the current shit shoot that is American health care and the ethical quandries in research, global health, distribution of wealth, ect., physicians should take a stronger role in areas outside the clinic.

I think med students are cool. I think we need to keep after activities beyond the biomedicine sphere. I am going to be doing my part by getting my hippy on...