Volunteering Reminded Me Why I Chose Medicine

Medicine

Giving back to the underserved can rejuvenate your passion too.

As a practicing physician, time management is key. You have to care not only for your patients but also spend time with family, friends, and deal with life in general. Why should you, as a busy practitioner, find time to give back to those less fortunate, and for free at that?! Your time is already so valuable! I’ll tell you why.

I first signed up to volunteer at a free health clinic in college. As a premed, it seemed like a good use of my Saturdays as it was a way to get my foot in the door and gain some much-needed medical experience for apps. While I may have started volunteering for these reasons, why I stayed with it for years is something else entirely.

As a premedical student, you obviously aren’t qualified to treat patients yet. Instead, I would triage patients, calling them in from the waiting room, taking their vitals, chief complaint, and history, and I would then present them to the physician waiting to see them. I learned a good deal about medicine, but that’s not why I kept going back.

You see, I learned even more about myself and why I was doing all this in the first place. Who from, you may ask? No, not the doctors. The patients. These patients would come in, beleaguered and unheard, and they would be so utterly grateful for the opportunity just to be seen and heard that they would thank me profusely for hearing them out and taking them to see the doctor.

Most of them had never seen a doctor before, as they could not afford to for various reasons. Money was the reason for most, but some patients had language barriers as well; they couldn’t communicate with doctors, and they were too afraid to seek care as a result. So they came to us instead.

I still remember a patient in particular, who came to see us because she had uncontrolled diabetes and her vision was starting to go bad. When we checked her A1c, it was 11. For those who don’t know, that’s not good. At all. Diabetes is diagnosed at an A1c of 6.5 or more, and 11 is crazy high. The doctor was in shock that she hadn’t developed any worse symptoms earlier. We were all wondering how she was so seemingly fine…

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