Propaganda I’m Not Falling For

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I’ve dreamed of being a doctor since I was 5 years old and watched 3 of my grandparents die from a sudden heart attack, nonhodgkins lymphoma, & locked-in syndrome after a brainstem stroke all in the span of a year.

As I began working in healthcare, it was quite a wake up call to realize how much of a mess it all is… between the stigmas many people hold about balancing a family with medicine and the uncanny feeling of being a cog in a corporate system just trying to churn out profits from a fast-paced meat grinder of human suffering as its input, I often contemplated alternative paths as I grew older and wiser.

I dabbled in foraging for my own plant medicine and strived to understand nutrition, lifestyle modification, the fundamentals of habit building, the benefits of mindfulness, meditation, & energy work, and the biochemical, physical, and emotional effects of trauma on the body & mind as I took my gap years between undergrad & med school working as a brain injury rehab counselor & caregiver. I spent my days becoming a better self learner in these domains in tandem with somatic learning through flow arts, fire performance, and pole dancing. Before entering medical school, I learned what true embodiment and walking one’s talk was supposed to look like.

So why DO? Why did not I not go alternative? The answer, for me, is simple: I wanted the conventional medical education because its depth and rigor into anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and biochemistry is unparalleled. I wanted this knowledge at my fingertips to then apply to all my other alternative passions I’ve been nurturing over the past 15 years. I wanted to have the ability to see through cognitive bias and misinformation that is now so rampant in the wellness space, and I wanted the privilege to blend both traditional as well as conventional medicine together because in the end—I believe in both.

The fact of the matter is, both paths are rife with flaws. The wellness industry thrives on selling products that aren’t clinically or third-party tested, it takes conventional medicine’s flaws and uses it as justification for how it’s all wrong and the wellness industry has all the answers. It says your health is all in your hands and if you just eat right, exercise, and take all the vitamins they tell you to, nothing bad will ever happen to you, completely ignoring the complex interplay of genetics and other environmental factors outside of a patient’s control. It takes purity culture to a new extreme… it’s no wonder an alt-right pipeline has formed in the wellness space and that realization still keeps me up at night sometimes.

During my gap years, I experienced hardships with affording my rent despite working 3 jobs at once and periods of lapses in my healthcare coverage because not 1 of those 3 jobs would step up to provide healthcare for me and I lived in a state where there weren’t great options for people like me. It was then I also realized the massive toll that lack of access to affordable healthcare had on everyday working Americans, and opened my eyes to the fact that health was truly a privilege that not all were blessed with beyond just genetics and environmental factors but also political factors.

While I always want to empower by patients when I see them, I’m also realizing how important it is to not parrot the toxic wellness space that a patient has total control over their outcomes, because it just simply isn’t true. I think the greatest gift I’ve received from all of my experiences has been the fact I know to meet a patient where they are, and encourage that any small and realistic change they can make is worthy and commendable, even if everything else is still a giant mess in their life.

I chose to become a DO because I want to be on the front lines, a practitioner with right credentials to be assimilated into these toxic corporate healthcare spaces but with the insight of alternative treatments and complex socioeconomic situations that empowers me to do more for my patients than the standard doctor’s visit. You see so much anger online from patients who do not feel listened to, dismissed, and confused that they are turning to sources of dangerous misinformation because it affirms their feelings that nobody in healthcare is listening, so they logically but dangerously deduce that all of healthcare is wrong.

Part of my mission is to reclaim patients’ trust in modern medicine while also walking a path that blends modern medicine with more natural and non-invasive modalities. This is what I mean when I say I want both, and it’d be impossible for me to do this without a conventional medical degree and residency training.

I didn’t really anticipate a silly viral Reels trend on instagram from inspiring what has essentially become a manifesto for the way I will practice medicine once I graduate, but here we are. I suppose these sorts of things have been weighing heavily on my mind as of recent, as my third year comes to a close. If I were not taking an extra year to do teaching and research, I’d be busy preparing my residency application and setting up my Sub-I audition rotations.

I am grateful for the extra year as I continue to craft my vision of how I want to practice in the future. It has been such a transformative 3 years for me as I’ve navigate life and medical school. My life has not been easy and so it’s nice to finally have so much to look forward to when I contemplate my future.