Medicine without works is dead

 

Medicine without works is dead 




One of the big transitions for a first year medical student is to maintain momentum. After a final exam ends a module, immediately (and I mean either the day of or the morning after), we start blazing with an orientation for the next module. 


The way to cope with this seems to be to sell your soul and try to set up reward circuits to maintain sanity, deferring hope until finally the degree is at hand and you can finally look back and say “I made it”. This short term strategy applied long term will produce chronic problems, which may be part of it, I don’t know. 


What I do know is that I came into medicine for its formation. ASMPH’s MD/MBA program boasts a bold promise to make dynamic leaders, outstanding clinicians and social catalysts– all these in one doctor rooted in Ignatian spirituality. I think it’s hard for us to reflect on this when it feels like we’re drowning in the trenches of MD mmemonics and MBA Busy-ness. But being a member of my generation of online loneliness in a sea of endless distractions, it’s hard to tell whether it’s enough when one could clearly be doing something else. Whether it’s Netflix numbing or productive research– the striving is to be something other than an ordinary medical student. 


When the story you tell yourself on why you pursue medicine is not enough–or you did not expect it to be like this–this existential threat becomes more important than succeeding in medical school. What is success anyway? Not grades alone. Sola gradia is heretical to ASMPH’s Catholic (in the sense of Katholos, meaning “of the whole”) worldview. 


We sometimes ask our upper year groups: “sa exam nito, mag-aalay lang ba tayo?”— for this exam, should we just put it on faith alone? Faith alone is another heresy to the Catholic whole. As St. James says “Faith without works is dead” (Js 2:20). Well to put the whole catchphrase in a medical context, “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” (Js 2:26). 


We’re studying anatomy right now, and it feels difficult for me to study the body alone. Our lecturers put clinical correlations to remind us of the spirit of medicine- putting things into “practice”- to become what we practice by virtue turned into habit. Studying the spine, we spin scoliosis. Groaning over glycolysis, we gloss over anemia. Honing hematology we try to get a hold of hemolysis. 


Indeed these can be studied scientifically on their own- such as with anatomists, physiologists or cell biologists, etc. But as medical students, we study basic sciences not to become scientists but to become doctors. It is very holistic… very “Catholic”- so I say Medicine without works is dead. For what profits a med student to gain the MD/MBA degree, yet forfeit his soul? (Paraphrased Mk 8:36). 


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