What to look for when choosing a doctor

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Brad Wallace

Candlebox rules supreme on the alternative rock station, and posters of "Pulp Fiction" are considered the height of dorm decoration chic. A young Brad Wallace attends the Pre-Health professions meeting, along with approximately 300 other doctor wannabes. We are given the encouraging news that most likely only a small fraction of us will actually become doctors.

If you think that your major is hard, consider the predicament of those applying to medical school. Arizona's school is considered only "somewhat" competitive, and yet has over 1,000 applicants for 100 spots. "Very" competitive schools may have something like 12,000 applicants.

Consider it like trying to make it in show business, just with organic chemistry.

It was enough to give me nightmares for the first two years of my college experience, at least once a week.

From this atmosphere of apprehension and dread is born the pre-med mentality. I'm positive you've seen them in your classes, the students who schedule office hours with professors several times a week, take fastidious notes and tape record every lecture.

The serious pre-meds carry with them an air of frightening instability, almost as if they were considering murdering their family if it would make for an interesting line on their reacute;sumeacute; that someone at Columbia Medical School might remember. I know I did.

I lost myself in this world of competition, raised nearly to religion, for quite some time and used to be a member of Alpha Epsilon Delta, the pre-med honorary here on campus. This is not a happy group of people, friends. The hours logged in volunteer work and community service by AED are staggering - most pre-meds commit themselves to several hundred hours of volunteer work in college and are absolutely bloodthirsty for new and exciting ways to look better than everyone else.

It all shattered for me after one AED meeting when I was talking to a "friend" (read competitor) after a meeting. He was an upperclassman, just beginning to apply. He said that he felt like all of the volunteer work he'd done with a hospice program was a waste if he didn't get into Baylor.

Snap! went my mind. It became obvious then that the pre-medical structure in America is utterly and completely flawed. You don't want your doctor to feel like he or she "wasted" time enriching other people's lives if it didn't serve their career advancement. I was sickened by how I had changed as a result of a few semesters fixated on medical school.

By the time I was eighteen, I'd spent several hundred hours doing volunteer work at a local hospital, primarily in the emergency room. "ER" hadn't come out on TV yet, so it wasn't very cool then to spend your Saturday nights mopping up vomit, but I did it because I liked it and it gave me an opportunity to marvel at the strength of both doctors and the people they served.

I saw victims of murders, suicides and rapes; dog bites, scratches, chicken pox, really bad acid trips and just about everything else you could ever imagine going wrong with the human body. I was completely changed for the better by those years in the ER, and it doesn't matter to me what anyone on an admissions board thinks about it.

The remarkable number of people who want to be doctors mandates that medical schools have very stringent requirements. However, it seems that the path to an MD has become nothing more than the mindless meeting of said requirements for many people.

That terrifies me for the future when all of these remarkably talented and intelligent people with the souls of jackals actually begin to practice medicine.

What it takes to be a doctor has been hotly debated since the age of Hippocrates. The answer isn't drive or education or how many hours you've spent as a candystriper. It comes back to the original premise of healing - "Do No Harm."

That includes harms against the soul, in which the beauty of participating in the art of healing is secondary to anything else.

My grade point average isn't stellar. I don't have as much experience as many other qualified pre-meds. I'd give myself maybe one shot in three at getting into medical school. I don't have nightmares about it, because ultimately, I've learned that people are basically good and make incredible sacrifices to help each other. It's enough to make even this cynic feel a little better about human nature.

So, when you see those pre-meds clamoring after class in a sycophantic crowd, stand back. Maybe feel a little pity and avoid ever going to a doctor who boasts of being in a pre-medical society.

Brad Wallace is a molecular and cellular biology senior. His column, Handful of Dust, appears every Tuesday and he can be reached via e-mail at Brad.Wallace@wildcat.arizona.edu.