My Life Of The Swing 's Gentle Motion

Learning Bharatnatyam, an Indian classical dance form, since the age of 5 has taught me perseverance and the importance of hard work —characteristics that will allow me to achieve my ultimate goal of becoming a doctor. This passion for medicine parallels my early journey through dance and has been reinforced by memorable experiences along the way. One of my earliest experiences involved a childhood friend who battled a brain tumor for nearly three years before succumbing to her illness. To me, her loss was heightened by a sense of unfairness—she was too young to have been robbed of her life before she truly had a chance to live. These thoughts followed me through adolescence as my mother also began to face a variety of health problems. Seeing how much disease and pain robs an individual of their essential nature frightened me and made me feel helpless.

A Heart for the Work: Journeys Through an African Medical School by Claire L. Wendland is both an first hand account of time spent in an African medical school and hospital as well as a critique on Western medical practices. Dr. Wendland, an accomplished anthropologist and physician, provides a first hand account of her time in a Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. Through this account she provides insight into the complete journey a student must take to become a doctor in conditions much different than our own. These insights and research are used to argue that medicine, or biomedicine as it is called, is part of a cultural system and is predicated on the cultural ideals and resources of developed nations. Wendland uses the differences in moral order, technology, and resources between the Malawian culture and our own culture to provide evidence for her main argument.

Selzer’s The Exact Location of the Soul captures the essence of being a physician by using first person point of view, a series of personal anecdotes, and such striking imagery.

As Beneatha describes the profound moment when she decided to become a doctor, her admirable, although childlike, determination and refusal to set limits on her future is illustrated. Beneatha says while discussing her dream, “...that was what one person could do for another, fix him up-sew up the problem, make him alright again. That was the most marvelous thing in the world...I wanted to do that. I always thought it was the one concrete thing in the world that a human being could do. Fix up the sick, you know - and make them whole again. This was truly being God…” (131). As Beneatha describes her dream with conviction, it is apparent how the decision to pursue her dream was created with faith in the practice, unconcerned with the efforts

I, Siddharth Ramputty, 31 years old medical practitioner, hail from Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean. I realised after my teen years , I could not be restricted to this small paradise (Imagine the fictional character Baggins from the Hobbit by J.R.R.Tolkien), so I left with all hopes and expectations to the "Incredible India" for my medical studies and Internship training and then later serve my country as a medical practitioner , had indeed changed my outlook and perspectives towards life. During those nostalgic transformative years, my friends and I , We with a lot of optimism , enthusiasm and sacrifices , overcame a lot

Mr. Zhao taught about the human body with such zeal and overwhelming passion, it encompassed me from day one. Though I had already planned on a being a pediatrician because I loved to care for kids, Mr. Zhao made actual medicine in relation to the human body another aspect of a health career to explore and love. You’re probably thinking, “Well yeah, you can’t just like people in the healthcare industry”, yet patient care, compassion, and sympathy play a definitive role in such a field. I’ve witnessed these elements of healthcare first-hand volunteering at Texas Children’s Hospital. I volunteered during the summer and do so now during the school year.

It was dark and there were so many noises around me as I slowly woke up and recalled I was in a hospital with abdominal pain. I then heard a familiar voice say “Sweetie, wake up! Wake up!” I opened my eyes to a blurry image of my mother. “Shhh… don't make any noises. We're leaving now. Just act like you are fine. We'll try to sneak out before anyone notices”, my mother said. She explained later that she could not afford to pay hospital bills, so we had to leave before any physician checked over. Living in Vietnam, I was filled with resentment towards their healthcare system, as people were rejected treatment and left to perish in the streets. As a child, I therefore never considered medicine as a career. My spark for medicine was unforeseen until I went on a high school field trip at INOVA Fairfax Hospital in Virginia. Hovering over the glass ceiling of the operating theater, I watched doctors performing coronary bypass surgery while witnessing the heart beat stronger and stronger. At this magical moment, I was overwhelmed by the power of medicine to save people’s lives.

The medical floor was the place where I could be a doctor yet remain a human being. It was intellectually challenging for me to solve different medical problems as well as natural to interact with diverse people from different social and cultural backgrounds. Since then, I have believed internal medicine is the perfect combination of medical science, critical thinking, and humanism. My passion was proven again while volunteering in Bhutan. I received a chance to provide coverage for an attending on the medical floor and out-patient unit while he was away from the hospital.

Two years ago, I was walking with my grandmother in Portugal. She often asked me to join her in her journey to tend to her garden or visit the locals. While on these walks, she always provided me with profound words of wisdom that I never quite understood at the time. She told me, "The human race is a garden, nurture your surrounding flowers." When she spoke these words, my idea of working in the medical field was validated. We, as individuals, make up this metaphorical garden. I believe that each person possesses some sort of talent or knowledge to nurture the other flowers. It is vital that one does so because we are all a part of the same garden. Nurturing one flower results in a closer step to a more perfect garden. This is why I plan to

I moved from New York to an impoverished village in India during my pre-adolescent age. There, my life saw juxtaposition like no other. From air-conditioned, colorful children wards where the nurse gave you “I was brave!” stickers (despite you throwing a fit) and lollipops, I saw children screaming in agony as crude and outdated procedures such as lobotomies were used to treat relatively

At the age of two, my mother left my two-month-old sister and me in the care of my 72-year-old Grandmother before she came to the United State in pursuit of a better life for herself and her family. My grandmother saw this opportunity as a great reward; the only thing that hindered her was her severe arthritis. Throughout the eight years ,which I spent with my grandmother, I witnessed her rise up early at dawn screaming over pains in her legs, she has fallen numerous times and had to be taken to the emergency room, and have gone from doctor to doctor in search of a cure. For this reason, I have chosen is to become a Physician. The ordinary man has within them, the desire to do good,and I despise seeing decent people, who work as hard as everyone else but does not get to experience life because of a disease.

As I began my medical education, I learned that the pain and suffering I knew intimately in my homeland existed elsewhere. Elsewhere that also had scarce medical care. I experienced the need in Egypt where I attended

Dilip was an 8 year old male of Indian descent. His father had moved the family to America to complete a residency in internal medicine. Dilip attended private school and had two older siblings, ages 13 (female) and 15 (male). Dilip’s mother was a full time homemaker.

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process. There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool and think about past pleasures irrecoverable and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians. I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings do not send their tuberous feeder roots deep into the potting soil of others’ emotional lives as if they were greedy six-year-olds sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw; and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without unpacking the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.

In a hot and sunny morning of October, the road led me to a rural community located miles away from Santo Domingo. A few meters from Haina riverside, the place in which I would spend a year far away from home for the first time in my life. I was 23, recently graduated from medical school, continuing my journey of helping people through one of the most honorable and rewarding arts, medicine. The duty: being the primary care physician of La Pared, an underserved community. I remember my supervisor asking if I was up to the task, given my youth and lack of experience.