Soundings: Miss Medicine

It was as though I had woken to find myself face to face with an award winningly ugly person and had no recollection of how I got there. That is exactly how I would describe the heart stopping feeling of realising that the days as a medical student are numbered. Where has all the time gone?

I suppose it all came about when the year got letters requesting people to conduct medical school interviews. I remember thinking how together the fifth year medical student looked in my interview. Such a contrast to the dusty old doctor sitting next to him. So now it is my turn to ask all those immortal questions and listen to the ever-creative replies-I can just imagine it.

Me: Why medicine?
Candidate: I wanted to be a doctor from six months' gestation.
Me: Are you a geek?
Candidate: No, I have climbed Everest and masterminded a political coup on a Pacific island.
Me: Well, after much consideration I'm sorry to say that due to your awful dress sense we feel that we cannot offer you a place at this institution. Try a London medical school instead.

You see, I would be awful at trying to determine what makes a good doctor from a 15 minute chat. Perhaps a new method of selection should be employed. In Switzerland anyone who wants to study medicine can, and then they weed out lots of people in the first year exams. In Finland they have a lottery-type system to pick out future medical students with numbered balls. I think that would be fun.

I believe that medical school selection procedures should become a game show like It's a Knockout. Imagine having the candidates all lined up wearing huge twenty feet tall rubber doctor costumes and having to race each other to the elderly diabetic patient lying in bed about 100 metres away. Their task is simply to take her blood pressure and put in a cannula with their big rubber floppy hands before rushing back to the finishing line. In the next round they could be chased around an assault course (still in their ridiculous costumes) by an angry patient.

I think these are much more entertaining ways of selection. You may mock me now, but mark my words. It is only a matter of time before medical school interviews are televised so that the public can choose who they would like to see as their doctor. {rvau}

Debashis Singh, fourth year medical studentUniversity of Leicester
Email: debsingh@hotmail.com


studentBMJ 2000;08:303-346 September ISSN 0966-6494