In my Early Clinical Experience, I was placed at an urban community clinic where “the underserved” included refugees and people struggling with substance use who found themselves living on the streets of Grand Rapids, sometimes wearing only flip-flops and raincoats to shelter them from a Michigan snowstorm.
My coworkers and I worked tirelessly to reach out to them and demonstrate that they could be known and still loved, and that they had infinite worth and potential that had yet to be realized. During the summer before medical school, when I was a counselor at a service-oriented camp for high school students, “the underserved” became teenagers trying to reconcile who they were with who they wanted to become. We were able to meet that need by bringing health care directly to them, using donor-funded supplies and volunteer manpower to make sure they got the medical treatment they needed in a place that was convenient for them. While on medical service trips to Malawi and Haiti, “the underserved” were the people who could not access medical care for themselves or their families, either because of geographic distance or prohibitive expense. In my short time on this earth thus far, I have learned that “underserved” patients can present in a thousand different ways.
The more I learn about full-scope family practice, the more I realize that this would give me the perfect blend of everything I love about medicine – a chance to be thoroughly involved in the health of my patients, and to walk with them and advocate for them in all stages of life. I have always been interested in primary care, but would I like the fast-paced and high-acuity setting of a hospital? Perhaps I could continue my interest in research by finding a spot in an academic center? Could I be happy taking care of kids all day, or would I miss the complexity of noncompliant older adults with ten different comorbid conditions? My time on clerkships has shown me that there are bits of everything that I like too much to give up for the rest of my career. In the past few years, I have struggled with conflicting ideas about what my medical practice would look like someday. I want to provide a space for each of my patients to feel known and cared for because I believe this is the environment where people get the best possible care.
As the primary liaison between a patient and the medical community, I will need to know each patient personally so that I am better equipped to advocate for them.
Throughout medical school, I have sought an avenue for practicing medicine which brings all of these things together, and in the past three years have discovered that family medicine is a perfect place to help me achieve this goal. I thrive on the challenge to understand things deeply and fully believe that a good physician needs to be a champion of lifelong learning, always seeking new things to learn and new ways to serve their patients. I love working with and learning about people from all walks of life, and decided to pursue a career in medicine so I could have a tangible skill set that would make me a useful member of any community I found myself in. Like so many others, I started medical school with the broad goal of “helping people”.
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