Physician Mission Statement

You are taking a stroll down a dark alley and someone walks up to you out of the shadows, grabs your shirt collar, and asks, “Why are you here?” I want to explore this question in more detail in relation to my being in medical school. Simply put: I want to change lives for the better and glorify God in the process. I am heavily inspired by the verse:

“Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31, NRSV)

In a way I want to be like a AAA service worker who helps people with car trouble when they are in tough spots. The only car incident I was ever in, if you can even call it an accident, was when my car inched into an embankment of snow to the point where I needed a tow to help my poor Lincoln get out of its slanted position. Likewise, I want to be a physician who helps people get out of physical and mental ruts in life.

However, whenever I hear that someone wants to help others in the future, I always wonder, what else motivates them? Is it possible to innocently want to help others and not want anything in return, like a Mother Teresa or a Gandhi? Martin Seligman has proposed PERMA as an acronym for what motivates people, with the letters standing for positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement.1 Seeing someone eat the food that I cooked at a food kitchen has given me surges of positive emotion (the P in PERMA) in the past, a feeling I would only imagine would amplify one day when I could give not food but life-saving medication when I am a fully-trained trained doctor. Does this good feeling make it selfish to want to help people then? I am not so sure, as it seems self-flagellation doesn't necessarily make serving others more moral. In a Christian perspective, feeling good while doing something beneficial for someone else seems like a potential reward by a good God for doing the right thing. In an evolutionary perspective, feeling good would reinforce such an altruistic behavior and increase the survival and reduce the suffering of the group, something many people who don’t affiliate with a spiritual group would agree on as being moral.

Despite philosophers having debated this topic for centuries, I do take the position that the benefiter can be benefitted by a moral act and still be doing “good,” so I want to discuss some other “selfish” reasons I want to go into medicine. Medicine is something I can be very engaged with and constantly learning in, which corresponds to the E (engagement) in PERMA. The R in PERMA stands for relationships, which applies to my situation in how I want to go into a specialty like Family Medicine or Psychiatry where I can have long-term patient-physician relationships. The M in PERMA is my biggest motivator for going into medicine, though, while A for achievement is likely my smallest motivation. When thinking about meaning in medicine, I immediately think of my Dad’s health situation when he overcame pancreatic cancer by getting the Whipple procedure and making a miraculous recovery with the help of people in the medical field at Johns Hopkins. This second chance at life that my Dad received relates to how Jesus has given me a “second chance,” through His grace, despite the many times I have fallen short in life. So, giving people second chances, pulling them out of ruts: this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. In this way I am not going into medicine for purely selfless reasons, but I do wonder if someone may actually be more able to help others if they get something personally out of the process. Opinions may vary, but self-care is something that is increasingly becoming accepted in the literature as something that must be an “imperative” for a physician population with relatively high suicide rates.2

Addressing the second prompt given by Dr. Hershberger, on the medical journey I am embarking on if I happen to become known by patients for being the kindest doctor they have ever gone to, then I would find even more M in PERMA in that.

References

1. Seligman M. PERMA and the building blocks of well-being. The Journal of Positive Psychology. 2018;13(4):333-335. doi:10.1080/17439760.2018.1437466

2. Kuhn CM, Flanagan EM. Self-care as a professional imperative: physician burnout, depression, and suicide. Canadian Journal of Anesthesia/Journal canadien d'anesthésie. 2016;64(2):158-168. doi:10.1007/s12630-016-0781-0