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In Practice
The Doctor-Patient Relationship (When You’re Neither) A medical student excited not by medicine, but by the opportunity to care for people that it affords.

Despite what I wrote in my medical school applications, my relationship with medicine wasn’t always the torrid love affair I made it out to be. Organic chemistry wasn’t really my favorite class (or my second favorite, or my third). My heart didn’t actually skip a beat as I waited for protein isolates to complete their snail-paced race across an agarose gel. And while I certainly enjoyed the surgeries I scrubbed into as an undergraduate, even they lost their charm during the fifth hour of standing at attention, hands glued to my chest, petrified I would break the sterile field or pass out from starvation. For me, a career in medicine was a leap of faith. I had to trust that those flashes of meaningful human interaction I experienced early on would increase in frequency and intensity over the course of my career. Fortunately, I have not been disappointed thus far.

Despite what I wrote in my medical school applications, my relationship with medicine wasn’t always the torrid love affair I made it out to be. Organic chemistry wasn’t really my favorite class (or my second favorite, or my third). My heart didn’t actually skip a beat as I waited for protein isolates to complete their snail-paced race across an agarose gel. And while I certainly enjoyed the surgeries I scrubbed into as an undergraduate, even they lost their charm during the fifth hour of standing at attention, hands glued to my chest, petrified I would break the sterile field or pass out from starvation. For me, a career in medicine was a leap of faith. I had to trust that those flashes of meaningful human interaction I experienced early on would increase in frequency and intensity over the course of my career. Fortunately, I have not been disappointed thus far.

Dhruv Khullar, "The Doctor-Patient Relationship (When You're Neither)," Hastings Center Report 42, no. 6 (2012): 7-9.