What does it mean to be a medical student?

 What does it mean to be a medical student?

Really, what does it mean to be a medical student? Can the question even be meaningfully answered without the usual "grind" or bringing in one's own story? Though each answer is different, there may be new ways to frame the question and what assumptions or considerations can be taken. I will make an argument for "mystery". All to glean an insight, and if it is achieved, then it is one step closer to attaining wisdom. This takes a little bit of playing with concepts; a little bit of philosophy. 

It is a unique thing that the term doctor is usually the colloquial substitution for physician. In my medical school we usually say "doc" to refer to our professors. In a way, it means "teach" since doctor in latin means to teach. There's a sense of authority as well even when the word is perverted to mean forging a document. "To make it look legit". In this sense, aren't us medical students learning to "doctor" ourselves into doctors? To make ourselves look legit. Impostor syndrome and "fake it till you make it" aside, it's as our ethics professor says when she paraphrases Aristotle: "you become what you do". Briefly reflecting on what the medical student seeks to become, let us now consider how we can work out the concept of the medical student itself.

The word "medical" originally meant "know the best course for", even before being incorporated with healing and curing. And of course, when one thinks of "student", we already know that she is one who studies, which corresponds with the latin studium. Putting it together, what it means to be a medical student is to know the best course for study or to study to know the best course. Either way, there is a familiar medical term in our parlance that may align with this– treatment. 

"Take this twice a day and call me in the morning": a phrase many of us may be familiar with that we associate to doctors. The imperative statement, if effective, is the course of action taken to heal. The doctor makes it imperative for the patient to follow her instructions, and, if she's a good one, also teaches the patient so he understands what the treatment is for. 

Medical students start out learning basic sciences in order to have confidence in making a decision to know the best course of action to take. In this sense, we learn what we already know about medicine– that it is practical. Prudence is its virtue.  There, then, can be no question that since medicine has to do with right action, and it is done for the sake of pursuing health (which we define as a good), then medicine is also ethical. What is the right thing to do for a person? In being ethical, it is also, then relational. 

No man is isolated– he is always in relation to something; always oriented to pursuing something. Always restless. To heal, in its earliest sense, means "to make whole". In sickness, then, something is taken away from our whole to make us feel only a part and incomplete. But with this standard, then everyone is sick and the doctor is not really a medicine man. This is only partially true. In many ways, one cannot understand health without sickness, not in terms of two different things in opposition to each other but in terms of one thing and its privation. And what is taken away is restored through healing. 

And this restoration is passive– it is something that is done to you. I do not heal myself, but I can take something that stimulates my being healed. Healing can only occur in between– it's a relationship. Nothing makes sense otherwise. 

The same sentiment can be reached with teaching. Let's use the specific teacher "doctor" and call the student a medical one.  Can a doctor really make a med student learn something if they don't already possess the knowledge to learn that something? This is, albeit modified and brief, the socratic problem posed in the Meno dialogue. With this line of reasoning, the doctor is not really a doctor (at worst he is a fraud) and a med student is not really a student (since he already knows). The only real irritation may be that we find ourselves seemingly unwhole for not knowing something we seem to have forgotten. The tragedy is that we put ourselves willingly in ignorance in the face of trying to find the solution to our partiality. And yet, we are "learned"; learning occurs to us, and this "givenness" is ours even if we put it aside in our everydayness– an entrance into the sacred.

What medics can then do is to order a state of affairs so that healing can occur. This occurs through "medicine", surgery, nutritional advice, etc., which are different ways to restore the body's intrinsic capacity for healing. Knowing the state of affairs to heal also entails knowing the state of affairs that doesn't lead to healing. That's the ethical imperative more clearly hashed out in western medicine. When one acts, she acts to heal, because healing is more desirable than harming, surely. 

This is the basic assumption we take when we sign up to be medical students– that what it is that medics do is "good", and the field, or "sphere", of ethical decision making in the medical context becomes more and more apparent as we continue our studies. Not only this, but also what it is we are learning is not really the doing of our "teachers" or indeed of our own accord– it is part of our nature, our restless, restless nature that we are drawn to so humble and so beautiful an activity, and privileged to study what indeed is the right course for our future patients– to help them put themselves in position (ad orientem) so that healing may occur. Thinking about it this way can dampen our obscuring ego in favor of pursuing what it is that is actually good about being restless– not to remain in willful ignorance and frustration, but to acknowledge our limits and appreciate the beautiful mystery of the whole human body.