Resident Physician Contributing Writer
Boston Medical Center
Syed is a medicine resident who is interested in health policy and health administration. He primarily looks at diversity and inclusion and leveraging them to create a medical workforce that can provide higher quality and better access to care for uninsured and underinsured populations. Syed wants to work on pipeline programs and on recruitment, retention and promotion of underrepresented minorities in medicine and also on creating medical school and residency curriculum that frames medical education in a social justice contest and addresses the intersection of race, sex and gender and medical sciences.
In 1999, the American Board of Internal Medicine and Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine defined a “problem resident” as a “trainee who demonstrates a significant enough problem that requires intervention by someone of authority, usually the program director or chief resident.”
Medical training and practice exposes us simultaneously to the beauty and tragedy of life. As a resident, you are thrown into a strange world in which death will often sit as an unwanted companion in the room with you and your patient.
A page, an email, a text will request that you report to the program director’s office to have a conversation about a complaint against you. You are terrified, offended, maybe irritated. As you leave rounds to walk to the office, your adrenaline pumps.
One evening, overwhelmed by burnout, I drafted a letter of resignation to my program director and saved it on my computer. The next morning, I deleted the email without sending it.
I first heard of Yayoi Kusama last year when her spellbinding exhibit came to the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Admittedly late to the international zeitgeist of Kusama, what initially drew me in was her story — a Japanese-American avant-garde artist who suffered from severe mental illness and successfully transformed that suffering into riveting artwork.
I wanted to know how other females in medicine felt on the subject of misogyny in medicine. I compiled a survey with 10 questions and space for comments. I used SurveyMonkey to create it, shared it publicly across social media, and trusted that only those who identified as female would complete it. The results are as follows.
We offer unique perspectives from three women at different levels of their gastroenterology careers.
Over the past 50 years, the demographics of medical school graduates in the United States has changed dramatically with the number of women (47%) almost equaling the number of men in 2014. However, the Association of American Medical Colleges reports that out of all the sub-specialties, orthopaedic surgery has the lowest proportion of female residents, instructors, assistant, associate, and full professors.
I distinctly remember my drive to the hospital for the first shift of my residency five years ago. It was a night shift, a fact that only added to my trepidation. My brain bounced frantically back and forth among a random assortment of topics of which I lacked, I felt, sufficient knowledge, but which knowledge I felt sure I would imminently be called upon to use in a critical situation.
Just as we have landmarks events that shape us in the adolescence of our personal lives, physicians also have landmark events that shape them in the adolescence of medical training — residency.
Several months ago, I was asked by an attending about my future plans. “So I can pimp you,” he said. I told him that I am pursuing further training in addiction medicine. “Isn’t that just for psychiatrists?”
The word “gestalt” is thrown around constantly during medical school, residency, and beyond. Although never specifically taught, we all develop an idea of what gestalt means — impression, clinical intuition, gut feeling, something we are meant to develop over time.
Resident Physician Contributing Writer
College of Medicine at the University of Alberta
Nicole completed her medical degree at the University of British Columbia and was studying Diagnostic Radiology at the University of Saskatchewan until she transferred to Family Medicine at the University of Alberta. She is also working towards a Masters in Health Science Education. In addition to medical education, her professional interests include culture in medicine and mindfulness meditation.
