What Would You Tell Your Children?

The emotions artfully articulated by this South African doctor are actually becoming increasingly commonplace here--technically not a third world country....

The other day a friend and I were trying to decide what we would tell our children of they wanted to study medicine. It wasn't all that easy. See, in addition to the truths mentioned above, there are other things about medicine, especially South African (or, I guess, any third world) medicine that you will only really understand when it's too late. For example, once you've finally completed your six years of routine humiliation at the hands of countless personality-disordered consultants and registrars, you'll be sent to some place far away from your home and very possibly not of your own choosing, to be abused and humiliated for a further two years as an intern. Just when you've settled into this new place - gotten comfy in your new house, moved in with/married your life partner - the government will once again move you to some backwater town with an unpronouncable name and no tarred roads to practice something that vaguely resembles medicine, but only in the crudest sense of the word.

In this backwater town, you will realise that, actually, you can't change the world when there are a bunch of idiots ruling it, and you'll watch in despair as mothers and babies and all sorts of other people die or become crippled from things you know are perfectly treatable, if you only had some basic drugs and resources at your disposal. You'll become more and more frustrated as half of your patients die as a result of laziness or plain stupidity, and the other half as a result of ignorance and corruption, and you'll wonder why it's called 'community service' as you have no service to offer your patients. You'll forget that you originally became a doctor so that you could cure people (mostly because a cure is as rare as a rabbit in Antarctica) - if you're lucky you'll maintain your strong sense of compassion, but if you're human it'll probably be, well, annihilated as you become completely swamped by people who just want things from you all day long and never seem to be interested in sorting their problems out themselves. After a year (or two, it now looks like) of this, you can go back to wherever you want, but you may very well end up slaving away at something thankless and unfulfilling as you wait for a post in something you really like, which you may or may not get.

(..)
But even with all this in mind, I can't imagine myself doing anything other than medicine.