| I don't think I said that enthusiasm was harmful, or non-beneficial. So I want to clarify: what I said was that people who aim at medical school because "they're passionate about medicine" are mistaken. They're passionate about a fantasy of what medicine is, because you don't really know what it's like until it's there (and popular depictions of it are as unrelated to actual medicine as 1980s hackers movies are unrelated to actual programming.) Many people are deeply hurt by the gap between fantasy and reality. They don't complain about it openly, but inside the doctor's lounge... oh yeah. Some find a new passion, for what medicine actually is. Sometimes this is closely related to their original ideas, more often, it's only tangential. But they're on fire, and that's great. Most just grow up, and find that they do a difficult but worthwhile job. They don't necessarily have a "passion" for it, but they appreciate the importance of what they do, and concentrate on doing it well. They work to take care of their patients, but also to avoid liability, and to earn their colleague's esteem. They're normal physicians. I'm discussing the fact that what people think medicine is vs. what medicine is has a huuuuge gap. You can't be passionate for a thing when you've only seen its mirage. That doesn't mean enthusiasm is inherently bad. It's misplaced. >it remains that there are young people that understand this No, there pretty much aren't. That's rather the key point. I've never met a student, resident, or practicing doc that said, in retrospect, yeah, they had anything resembling an accurate clue about what medicine would actually be like. |
I agree public perception of a field lags behind reality, but it’s only a lag. Medicine has been a tough job for awhile. There are students who understand this well enough to handle the adjustment (since they don’t have first-hand experience yet.) It’s not a failure of “passion” if it’s crystalized into tangible goals, and better developed motivations and principles, as the student matures. It’s also not fair to equate surprise at some of the reality of a job with regret.
Finally, I know people who pursued medicine from childhood and are doing well in it. Granted, most of them had doctors for parents, but they were still quite excited.