Preparing for Medical School

Aside from the intellectual and technical challenges that medical education presents, there are a variety of other considerations that must be faced by professional school students. Among these are the realizations that:

1. There is a great diversity in the patients that one sees. One is not surrounded by a homogeneous population, but by all types of people — rich and poor, young and old, educated and illiterate.
2. There are emotional as well as physical factors to be dealt with in patient care, including crises in the lives of patients.
3. The issues of pain and suffering, of dying and death are aspects of life that are distant from the young, healthy student who must learn to cope with them in a sympathetic, although somewhat detached, manner.
4. There are ethical issues to consider that cannot be defined scientifically, such as who shall be born, who shall live, who shall die.

Medical school does not adequately prepare one for the aforementioned problems and thus it is the premedical experiences and training that tend to mold one's values on these subjective issues. Only by an in-depth exposure to the human condition through literature, religion, and philosophy can the student develop the capacity to face the nonacademic aspects of the medical professions.

The inexperienced medical student is usually unable to assess the issues that defy scientific definition — the issues of human diversity, suffering, life and death. These questions are peripheral to mastering the mass of scientific information and technical skills during the preclinical years. It is during the premedical years that the opportunity exists to acquire the exposure that molds values relative to nonquantifiable moral issues. If these ethical guidelines can be acquired by formal and/or informal education in the course of one's college years as a premedical student, then a solid foundation will have been laid for the medical training that will follow, and ultimately a well-rounded physician will emerge to practice in the twenty-first century.