Quote:
Originally Posted by bipolarmedstudent
So, last time I saw my psychiatrist, he said something that upset me a great deal. He questioned whether becoming a doctor is the right career choice for me. Basically, he said that my obsessive attention to detail (my mania/OCD combo) would be great in a career such as research, but he's not sure if I'm well-suited to becoming a doctor. He was saying that in medicine, you sometimes have only 5 minutes to spend with each patient, and you have to keep moving on, and he can't see me being able to do that.
He is also very much pushing me to take next year off to do a master's, because he doesn't think I can handle doing clinical rotations next year. Now I'm wondering if he just doesn't think I'm well-suited to medicine, period, and he's hoping I'll drop out of med school!
Well, I feel very upset about this. I think I'm great at what I do, and I think what I do is great for me. Helping people is how I stay sane. And I think I'll be a fantastic doctor one day.
How could he question that? I feel devastated that he thinks I won't be a good doctor.  |
I think you sound level-headed and passionate about what you're doing. I do think that taking a year to do research will not hurt you in any way in the long term. You'll still reach your goals and when you're older you won't feel like finishing school at 30 was much different than finishing at 29. At the risk of sounding negative, I would also encourage you not to dismiss a career in pathology or radiology. Bipolar is often a moving target and you can't underestimate the difficulty of working as a clinical doctor when you're not at your best. It's also extremely difficult to "remove yourself" from clinical situations when things are not going well; the nature of this illness is such that we experience our moods and thoughts as entirely true, and it's not always easy to sense an episode at its onset. To this end I would encourage you to spend time in various specialty rotations before making your decision. Finally, if you do decide that internal medicine is the specialty for you, make sure that you know what the day-to-day work is like. I suspect most internists will tell you that they can't spend 30 minutes with each patient.
It sounds as though your psychiatrist has the best of intentions and his or her advice might be worth consideration. You might also consider that he or she is an MD and has some additional insight into life as a medical student and practising doctor. Just my two (or three) cents....
