Fellow Physician Contributing Writer
Philippine General Hospital
Dr. Masamayor is diplomate in internal medicine and current endocrinology fellow at Philippine General Hospital (UP-PGH).
I was up before dawn, dressed in the comfiest, most adult-looking outfit I owned: a blue-and-white floral blouse, flared maroon pants, and navy walking shoes. After enduring an intense 200-point exam, two grueling weeks of pre-residency (think of it like a two-week job-interview-slash-free-trial), and countless days of calming myself down, it’s time for the real ordeal: my first day of internal medicine residency training.
Third year feels different. Intern year taught me how to work. Every note, every consult, every long night sharpened the mechanics of patient care. You learn to move efficiently, anticipate needs, and steady your hands when everything feels new. It is a year of doing, of survival, of quiet endurance.
At the start of medical school, many students participate in the “White Coat Ceremony.” Before peers, faculty, and family, they recite a modern version of the Hippocratic Oath (or other affirmations like the Geneva Declaration) and don the short white jacket they’ll wear during the four years of school. Although they begin seeing patients only in the third year, part of the ceremony’s intention is to convey that care for patients begins, in a sense, on this first day. When they earn their M.D., they are entitled to the knee-length version.
The rapid introduction of revolutionary technologies like minimally invasive robotic-assisted surgeries will exponentially increase complexity in medicine, law, education and ethics. Roboethics deals with the code of conduct that robotic engineers must implement in the artificial intelligence of a robot. Through this kind of ethics, roboticists must guarantee that autonomous systems will exhibit ethically acceptable behavior in situations in which robots interact with patients.
Recently, several attending physicians sparked controversy on Twitter by implying that low-income medical students or trainees should not pursue careers in medicine. While these tweets have since been deleted, the systemic injustices that they echo still ring in the highest levels of modern medical education. As a medical trainee from an impoverished household, I have spent almost my entire post-secondary education and medical training as part of an invisible demographic.
“You could help us with our diversity efforts. If you came here, you could be a part of building up our diversity program.” Who said I wanted to help with your diversity efforts? Why hasn’t it been built up already?
As the COVID-19 pandemic stretched into the late spring months, the ACGME made the recommendation to hold all residency and fellowship recruitment for the 2021 Match cycle virtually. At University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, preparations began.
The Collective for Resident Rights at Yale wrote the following list of demands, under our rights as medical trainees, related to the COVID era. It is time to organize. Our collective voice cannot be silenced.
As a program director, I am worried about my trainees who are already challenged with the usual stressors of graduate medical education (GME). This new illness is threatening to upend and disrupt our program in ways that I cannot even imagine, and therefore cannot plan for.
You could feel it in the air, in how the nurses double-checked the orders, how the attendings’ notes bloated in size, and even in how the patients, despite their general lack of knowledge towards the inner workings of the hospital, exuded mild apprehension. It was day one of the academic year, the day that the new interns — my new interns — started.
Residency is a challenging time plagued by long hours, overwhelming clinical service loads, escalating documentation requirements, and inadequate resources for support. A recently published study in the New England Journal of Medicine illustrates how mistreatment in the training environment takes an additional toll on medical trainees.
I had just started my first clerkship of third year at a nearby hospital when the news broke. Hahnemann Hospital, the main teaching hospital of my medical school, was closing. More accurately, the hedge fund manager who purchased the hospital a year earlier was filing for bankruptcy. He separated the valuable Center City real estate from the hospital itself to ensure a tidy profit for investors at the expense of patients and staff.
Resident Physician Contributing Writer
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Karim is a PGY-1 in the Montefiore Primary Care and Social Internal Medicine Program and a member of PPF-PA.
