As you embark on a career path toward becoming a doctor, you will have your moments when you need some inspiration and motivation to get you through the toughest points in your journey.
There are always things you can do to push through the tough times. If you're still an undergraduate prepping for the MCAT, you can invest some time in MCAT tutoring to give you your best shot at admission. Additionally, exercise to reduce stress, find friends to study with, or simply get away for a fun weekend to refresh and recharge you.
Of course, sometimes the motivation has to be internal. When you're feeling bogged down by coursework or other demands, keep your eyes on the prize. Don't envision your career as an endless line of sore throats and ingrown toenails, because it won't be. Your career in medicine can be amazing, and reminding yourself of what you could do is a powerful way to invigorate yourself.
Look at some of the things on the horizon and imagine yourself treating your patients with these new procedures--or even imagine yourself helping to develop them.
Advancements In Stem Cell Use
People sometimes pine away for their childhood, wishing they could go back and undo what they had done as adults. They want to rewind and redo so that they won't face the challenges they are facing today.
This is much like stem cell therapy. These techniques use stem cells gathered from umbilical cords and other postpartum tissues to generate therapies to treat a wide array of diseases and conditions previously thought untreatable.
As this field advances--still fairly new at just a few decades old--there will be an ever-larger demand for scientists and physicians to conduct the laboratory research and follow it up with field trials in the people who could actually be cured of what was once incurable.
A Cure For Cancer?
The public is beginning to understand much more about cancer, thanks in large part to the intense research of thousands of doctors and scientists. The general population now realizes that cancer is a family of diseases with as many different branches and subsets as there are body systems affected.
Because people now understand that there's no one type of cancer, many people have lost hope for a panacea cure for all forms. Ironically, even as the number of identified cancer types grows, we may actually be closer to a single cure.
Immunotherapy for cancer helps the body's own defenses to fight off cancer just as they fight off a pathogen. Treating cancer with the body's own resources could eliminate the need for chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery for many patients. Programming the immune system to attack cancer is a main thrust of oncological research right now, and as this field advances, there will be more and more demand for skilled workers to carry out the research.
Gene Therapy
We have long accepted that conditions caused by genetics were irreversible, treatable only with therapies meant to manage symptoms but not curable.
That may change in the next generation. Now that the entire human genome has been mapped, we have been able to identify what is responsible for certain diseases. There are prospects for finding cancer genes, Alzheimer's genes, and thousands of other DNA culprits for otherwise hopeless situations.
As this research process snowballs toward the resolution of countless problems, there will be a high demand for skilled research doctors to help develop these processes for treatment.
Medical school is demanding. Getting admitted to medical school is demanding. But what it will allow you to do will cause you to look back someday and realize it was all worth it. Keep your eyes on the prize, and don't limit what you think the prize can be. Instead, imagine all the unimaginable things that medicine may accomplish during your lifetime, and keep pushing forward.
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