Accidental Doctor

As a youngster I never dreamt of becoming a doctor. A doctor was all just a bit too establishment and for clever people, science nerds in particular. Certainly not for academically lazy and fluffy humanities-types like myself. And yet here I am, about to take on another four year installment of higher education, on the threshold of that most painful of initiation ceremonies, a medical degree.

An intellectual inferiority complex and a streak of masochism nestle amongst the more conventional I-want-to-make-a-difference motives for this latest stretch of my career meander. And also the desire for something a bit 'harder' than my current incarnation as an osteopath. I've never felt the profession appreciates the extent to which our popularity is partly due to the luxury of time we can lavish on our patients. Concern for the health of Mrs Jones' cat is often just as important as our special powers to address the rotational lesion of her second lumbar vertebra. There's not a lot of room for scepticism in complementary medicine. Doubting is for good doctors, not the healer. Patients need to believe in the magic of our trade.

Of course the purveyors of holistic propaganda amongst my colleagues and the teaching staff at the osteopathic college were right. Conventional western medicine has issues. Some old, some new. Its iatrogenic record (tendency to kill people), easy seduction by the pharmaceutical industry and erosion of the doctor- patient relationship by the mountain of technology growing between them; these are all troubling. In this respect I'll be sleeping with the enemy. But an enemy that seems to be waking up to the competition. Communication skills have cosied themselves up with medical curricula and the bio-psycho-social model is becoming more a modus operandi than just a flashy academic concept. Your GP's 'Dr knows best' paternalism is giving way to something more collaborative.

Such flippant analysis aside, my motivation to become a doctor is probably more fundamentally childish in nature. I'm finally pursuing that cliched when-I'm-grown-up fantasy of becoming a life-saver. Back then it was a fireman, but a doctor seems a reasonable trade-in, swapping one hero archetype for another albeit bespectacled one.

I'm apprehensive about the journey ahead. The 'fast- track' course I'm on expects me to swallow twice the number of textbooks usually expected of one year's study. And although dubiously entitled a 'mature' student, I know this won't cut any ice with the rights- of- passage rituals to join what is a particularly hierarchical tribe. But I'm also excited by the many challenges a medical training and career offer. And confidence is high, for anyone interested, that there will be more than a fair dose of material, tragicomic or otherwise, to report from behind the lines...