Medical Matters: Is there a doctor in the career-guidance room?

‘I want to do medicine.” Youngsters have been telling me this for more than 20 years and I still don’t know what to say to them.

You interfere in a young person’s life at your peril, yet it is rather as if they said that they want to become a professional rugby player or a traditional musician. You have to put an awful lot into it to have a decent life.

Most doctors will admit that they could take medicine or leave it, depending on the type of day they are having. On the day when it all goes well, you feel privileged to be an important part of people’s lives. You work with them on plans and strategies that make everybody feel better and your timely interventions are inspired and valuable. You change lives and do good work.

On a bad day, all your words and medications are useless, patients have another agenda and you are weighed down by administration, medico-legal nonsense and by people who determinedly go their own way to perdition.

Then you remember that you could have had an easier and possibly more fulfilling life if you had put something else on the application form. A few weeks ago, Padraig O’Morain wrote about the imaginary life we could have had; the one that we keep in our daydreams.

Until I read it, I had thought I was the only one – and then I remember the many fine doctors who regularly moan about all the other things they could have done with their points. In my alternative careers I am a lecturer in drama at a university somewhere or I am a landscape gardener. Sometimes I run a surf shop in Dunfanaghy.

The tightrope walk of medicine where you balance life and death then seems very far away. The life unlived is always easy and, in your alternative world, there are no regrets, no sickness, no sorrow and no bad days.

Young people still want to become doctors and no amount of hard work will dissuade them. So what should I say when they ask me whether they should do it?

Leaving Cert

The ability to get a great Leaving Cert is not the best reason. If you get into medical school, you will have achieved maximum points, but carrying a medical career around to remind everyone is a bad idea.

Having worked like a dog to get in, you will now work like a carthorse to stay there. You will find more bad manners in a hospital than you will on any building site. You will undoubtedly encounter bullying and glass ceilings, sexism and racism.

No matter how good you are, you will eventually make a hames of something and the Medical Council is always waiting to fall on you from a great height. No matter what you do, you will have little control over your career or where you end up living.

I have known very few doctors who are in it for the money. Some do make a lot, but you will find that the one with the big house and the almost as big car is the workaholic who has no time to spend in either.

A medical career is not only an enemy of spare time, of contemplation and other interests, but of creativity.

Doctors are supposed to be perfectionists who are also empathic and open all the time. This is a perfect recipe for burnout and regret. Like the rugby player, you have to keep your mind in the right place and mind yourself.

My father told me to beware any job that carries a title. If you are addressed as Doctor, Father, Taoiseach or Judge, you are expected to be that person all the time and all that goes with it. It is an aura that is hard to put down and other people’s ideas of what you should be like can be hard to bear.

You interfere with a young person’s life at your peril. There are born doctors out there, decent hardworking people who thrive on it and make the world a better place. And most people, if they stick it out, find their niche.

It gets into your bones and your DNA and many are content with that; but if it doesn’t work out, don’t worry. There are many roads to fulfilment and a medical career is just one of them.

Dr Pat Harrold is a GP in Nenagh, Co Tipperary. Dr Muiris Houston is on leave.