Each year, thousands of students choose to become doctors or nurses and pursue medical school. Labeled as “pre-medicine” or “nursing” students, they begin to prepare themselves for the most demanding classes: organic chemistry, foundations of biology, and microbiology.
They seek out jobs in local hospitals as patient care technicians, unit partners, or even just volunteers. I have found myself going down this same trajectory, spitting out one-liners like, “Can I help you use the restroom?” or “Need anything else while I’m here?” to my patients.
But most of that is pre-rehearsed, mimicked from the other techs and nurses I’ve shadowed. These jobs are repetitive, slightly adapted to each patient’s needs, but come with a very clear job description: bathe and wipe your patients, take blood sugar, help them use the restroom, walk down the hallway, and track their intake and output.
I began to wonder if this was truly preparing me to work with patients. Yes, I was taking care of them and tending to their immediate needs, but was I learning to communicate difficult things? Was I learning how to explain medical processes they had never been exposed to before? I don’t think so.
Everyone has encountered a health issue and felt the urge to Google their symptoms. That does us no good. It only creates more fear. If you type in stomach ache, Google will spit out something adjacent to cancer.
The point of the doctor is to alleviate some of that stress, but if you get to their office and receive little to no answer, the spiral of anxiety worsens. University of Iowa pre-med student Grace Rollo started this cycle in high school.
“I began to notice I was having symptoms similar to a panic attack, but even after seeing a psychiatrist, nothing was relieving these ‘anxiety-like’ symptoms,” Rollo said. “So, I started making visits to the doctor many times a year, but I got no answers. Even starting to go to school became difficult, and I had to change to a hybrid system so I could rest at home.”
After two years and a seven-hour drive to the Mayo Clinic, Rollo found out she had postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a condition related to the nervous system, only by the regulation of heart rate and blood pressure when changing positions.
“When I was having ‘panic attacks,’ I was actually falling asleep. But everyone just wrote it off as mental health issues. I think if they listened to my denial of it, I would’ve been able to fight it earlier,” Rollo said.
But isn’t the whole purpose of medical and health professionals to be responders and good listeners? What is driving this wedge and gap in understanding between patients and doctors?
I believe we’ve far reduced health care to science. Most pre-medicine students major in something STEM-related, like biomedical sciences, biology, chemistry, neuroscience, kinesiology, and human physiology.
It is rare for someone to pair the already calculated and analytical nature of the pre-medicine track with something related to the humanities.
Perhaps I’m biased as a creative writing major, but even though it’s a seemingly disparate field, writing stories, fiction or nonfiction, has taught me one thing that is the pinnacle of health care: how to listen.
Khushal Gujadhur’s class on poetry writing at the University of Iowa taught me how to dissect meaning out of oddly interwoven words. Foundations of Creative Writing required me to extensively read different writing styles and forms of communication, even the issue of chronic sickness and lack of medical cooperation.
Even capturing interviews as a journalist has improved my listening skills. How often do pre-med and nursing students find themselves in a position where they are graded on transcribing others’ pain and issues, or even their own?
I can’t count on my fingers how many times I’ve heard a pre-med student state that the English portion on the MCAT was the easiest. That means we are all capable of comprehension and connection with others, yet UPenn studies show that patient satisfaction has seen a steep decline post-COVID.
We need to place health care students in situations where they are applying these humanity skills in real life and academic settings. Disciplines like history, English, sociology, psychology, and more teach us to become passionate about people.
They teach us respect for the backgrounds others come from and to crave learning someone’s story or even writing it yourself. Medicine and health care are forms of the humanities. They are the study of people before taking action to treat and accommodate their ailments and pains.