Why did I choose Emergency Medicine?

Why did I choose Emergency Medicine?

Emergency Medicine is a very young specialty, at least in the country that I currently reside in (India). You could ask why I chose to skip the mainstream route of MD / MS in any other branch of Medicine or Surgery and opted for a career in Emergency Medicine. 

Well, this is a question I have been trying to answer for many years. It’s like I know the answer to the question but I can’t put it into words exactly. In this blog post, I hope to do just that. 

To give you a background, I studied my MBBS at GSL Medical College, Rajahmundry, India.

So while I was in my undergrad, there was a Doctor who came to visit my college. His name was Dr. Philip and he was working as an ER physician at a missionary hospital in Bihar. So he explained how he finished his emergency medicine residency in the US, and chose to work in the most remote parts of Bihar, India for the love of patients and being moved by their helplessness. Just listening to him describe how he would diagnose a case, and initiate the required treatment before handing it over to the concerned speciality was something that fascinated me. It was like this doctor knows everything(Which was not the case , but it sure did feel that way to me.)

Like we were led to believe that, If a doctor doesn’t specialize by doing post-graduation after completing MBBS, there was no hope for that doctor in the modern era because of the competition. So if a doctor was specialized in a particular branch, they would become kind of obsolete in the other departments of medicine.

 Let’s just say, hypothetically,  I met someone while I was traveling somewhere, and I introduced myself as a doctor and they would ask me something pertaining to them, but totally unrelated to my specialty, all I could tell the person would be this is not my area of medicine, you would have to talk to so and so doctor. I didn’t like being put in such kind of situation. That’s when it struck me, If I were to be helpful to a wide variety of patients, Emergency Medicine was the way to go. 

8 years after this realization, I completed my 3-year residency in Emergency Medicine and am looking for further career progressions.

You can go through the blog and read about the exciting cases I have seen during my career. Cheers !