The medical profession is one of the noblest and the most respected careers all around the world. It gives a chance to help many people and cure their illnesses. Saving someone from a severe condition or a disease and further maintain their health, what can be nobler than this. Medicine is, no doubt, a courageous and commendable profession. There is no racialism in this part of the career because, for the practitioner, there is no rich or poor, white or black, and neither good nor bad.
It is not easy for doctors to acclimatize the smell of hospitals, illness, or watching someone die, even when while trying their best. Well, that’s the reason why medicine is among the most challenging and respected occupation in society. Dreaming about being a doctor is easy, but working on being one is tough. It’s like running a race full of hurdles, full of complications but a track that is going to change their life for good.
Moreover, healthcare degrees are a significant demand for society, and for achieving a degree like this requires a lot of hardship and dedication of a student. Undoubtedly, it is the most demanding and challenging course during college, and medical students have to go through a lot of challenges throughout the years.
Some Basic Challenges Faced By A Medical Student Are As Follows
Unlimited Workload
For every medical student, the first two years of medical school are critical and necessary. The students have to study with full concentration because of the lengthy course. Students have compulsory courses such as anatomy, biochemistry, microbiology, pathology, and pharmacology in the first two years of medical school. The course is challenging to memorize by an average student as it contains a lot of medical terminologies. A lecture of 100-200 words is expected by a student to remember in a day. Doctors have no room for mistakes or flukes in their life. They need to know every answer to the question or medical solution to any medical problem, and for this, they need to study every medical terminology. Doctors are also called human medical encyclopedia because of their knowledge about medicine.
Students have to make compromises and maintain patience throughout the period. While trying to keep the balance between studies and health, students often end up choosing studies rather than health, which can make a student grumpy for sure. If the student wants to carry on and turn themselves into successful doctors, they should not let the workload affect their health at all.
Stress And Anxiety
As medical is one of the highly demanding courses of all time, stressing over it is normal. Many students stress over how they’re going to cover all the syllabus in such a short time, which leaves an impact on their psychological health. It makes a study for students more hindering knowing that they have to study a lot of new things and go through tough exams, and not only this but also the fear of failing the exam will put an end to their career.
Students start to feel vulnerable at some stages of their life when they decide to give up or take a break from things they’re stressing about, but this is all worth it because once the student steps into the real world of this profession, the stress level increases. Students should know how to brace themselves for upcoming stress threats and maintain a healthy diet to lower the stress level.
Time Restriction
There is approximately 17 percent of the time pressure on students in this industry. It is hard to maintain a balance between work and time. Managing time is critical for overcoming the stress for the students in medicine. They have to prepare the assignments that the end of the day has provided them. So there is a lot of learning matters and less time to conclude the stuff for them. They have to study day and night, every day without a pause to get their hands on the degree everyone wishes to get. Compromising their diet and other daily activities makes them a medical student in the first place. For the less consumption of time, students should work in groups to divide the workload and time pressure.
Expense
To pursue a career in medicine, one should be well financially stable. No wonder that it is an expensive and overwhelming field in the education system. From the very start till the very end of the course, students have to face many pauses due to the financial crisis, and some are often left behind. The cost of many medical schools is escalating rapidly due to the rate decreasing rate of federal funding and scholarships are being declined. But although this field has developed gradually with the same basic concept of it and for graduating such an immense course, unwavering confidence is a must.
Dealing With The Raw
Here it comes to the practical realities of the medical world when students witness the very naked and shriveled human bodies. Opening up a real human body and seeing all the wounds can be a lot stressful for the student doing it for the first time.
Standing there with a forceps in hand and witnessing the emotional stress of the patient will shake the confidence of a student. The best possible way to keep the confidence level stable while performing surgery is to avoid getting attached emotionally to your patients and stay humble.
Wearing that white coat means that the student has the weighty responsibility of work since there are hundreds of expectations from patients as one oath to save their lives at all costs.
Dealing with the clinical exposures starts from the third year of medical school in which the student interacts with patients and do the clinical examinations. To get this far, students have to work hard and get themselves prepared by professional health care departments to achieve what they have been waiting for always.
Clinical Skills
Students reach the level of clinical training through several challenging experiences. Here the challenges are not over yet, and the journey starts from here. In the clinical learning experience, students develop their interacting skills and enhance the quality of planning their future promotions. Students have to acquire knowledge and a perfect attitude to interact with a patient in the future, for this student visits the nursing education department. It can be hard for one to get used to the smell of hospitals or clinics when standing all day long and invigilating the environment around them.
Looking at the sick and naked bodies can affect the confidence of students, and then they have to face taunting about their professionalism from others. For enhancing their skills, students have to show professionalism while interacting with patients and cure the sick with much more confidence.
Less Motivation
Sitting unconscious, tired, and unmotivated can bring up difficulties in the way of “wanting to be a successful doctor.” When the appropriate mentorship doesn’t cater to students, and they start feeling demotivated and less wanted, which can make students suffer from burnout eventually. Lack of stress and autonomy can cause trauma. All the pressure and lack of sleep etc. can overdrive a student, especially during exams.
To overcome this situation, students should keep in touch with their families and friends, discuss their problems, and try to come up with a peaceful solution. They should relax their minds by doing healthy exercises like yoga, which may help them fight depression and find inner peace. And don’t forget to sleep well.
Technology
When there is a massive range of content that has to be memorized by a student, it gets tough for the students to get along with the new medical technology. With everything else growing so fast and rapidly, technology counts in, and having less knowledge about the technology can lead to errors in the working world. With technology, it’s a challenge to select the right one and use it on patients for better health purposes. For this, students are obliged to be trained for the use of new technology. Billions of dollars are being spent on healthcare technology every year. And due to this reason, students suffer and get to pay a lot for their training sessions.
Conclusion
Pushing yourself into a career like medicine is not easy, and then surviving it for five years is harder. Later eventually graduating yourself out puts you in a world of practice. Life of a doctor is not as easy, but it has the privilege of saving and caring for lives. Students should make sure they don’t stress about anything and try to reward themselves each day because all the stress and anxiety they’re going through, is WORTH IT ALL.
