I
absolutely LOVE emergency medicine. To anyone who’s ever spoken to me for more
than 3 minutes, this is fairly apparent. So many features of it draw me in:
it’s thought-provoking, exciting, general and it’s the only place in the
hospital where you can get away with running through the corridors. Since
second year, emergency med has been my baby and something that I take pleasure
in revising.
Conversely,
there’s dermatology.
Not
to offend any budding dermatologists reading this, but I find your preferred
speciality painful. I honestly think I’d rather use a cactus as a suppository
than revise the different nerve cells in the skin. To me, there is little
difference between reviewing histology slides and soft-core masochism (other
than the masochism bringing some people pleasure). These are values I’ve
carried firmly with me throughout medical school; however, after spending a
week in dermatology, I’m starting to question my stance.
Before
my placement this week, my dermatology knowledge was shockingly poor. But after
spending a week with experts in the field, I’ve realised that it’s actually
even worse. For the past three years, I’ve avoided derm like the plague and now
it’s come round to shoot me in the foot. Despite my incompetence, the doctors I
was with were really supportive and actually helped me learn quite a lot. I’m
far more confident when examining skin lesions and can understand the different
types of melanoma more clearly now. Dare I say it, I find it…interesting?
So
then, why the change?
It
actually took me a fair amount of reflection to realise why I now don't mind it
so much, but now I realise – I like it because I understand it. The junior
doctors explained dermatology to me in a way that made me comprehend disease
profiles and histology. I never liked it before because I never understood it,
and I never understood it because I didn’t enjoy learning about it. I created a
cycle which I’ve only recently realised I had even developed, all because I
didn’t want to do the grunt work in my pre-clinical years.
While
it is frustrating that I have 3 years worth of dermatology to catch up on, I’m
glad that it’s led me to realise that there are some areas of medicine that I avoid
out of laziness. Tied in with that, I'm now more aware of what I don’t know, so
I can work around that to fill in the gaps. Avoiding areas of medicine that I
struggle with is a character trait which I have to get rid of, if I ever want
to be a great doctor. Fear of the unknown and not acknowledging your own
ignorance is destruction and does nothing to address the issue at hand. And
while it’s created a lot more work for me now, it’ll hopefully mean that in the
future I won’t make a fatal mistake. For example, misdiagnosing a melanoma for
a mole.
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