Leaving medicine

After two years of trying to mould your life so that it satisfies a small panel of administrators, after five years of gruelling assessments, you can, at last, call yourself a doctor—an underpaid, overworked junior doctor, however. What about your friends and families, what about your life outside medicine? For one side to excel, the other must fall.

As a medic you see things that you've never seen before—new life, old death, physical decay, and spiritual resolve. You see things that elevate your mood and others that send it to the darkest abyss. How can you cope?

To survive as a doctor, you have to preserve your ability to think. To think objectively don't you have to cast off your emotions? For the sake of professionalism, yes, you do. But how do you switch from an unfeeling doctor who fakes compassion so well to a normal human who feels it?

Why do we do it? Why do we put ourselves under so much stress? We know it's not for money—we could do much less to receive much more. So why do we do it?

Is it for charity? To put everyone before you, to save hundreds of lives by letting your own spirit crumble? Is it worth it; does the satisfaction we get from this make up for the self sacrifice? In a perfect system we would say, “Yes, the tradeoff is fair, the result is dazzling.”

But we do not live in a perfect system: medicine like so many other things is a business, a profession, not an act of altruism. There are books to balance and standards to maintain. Just as the child pulls the strings of the puppets, governments and accountants guide a surgeon's scalpel. They tell us to deny treatment, to dismiss some in favour of …