VICDOC Autumn 2023 - Magazine - Page 41
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CAREER
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I WANTED TO BECOME A SURGEON WHEN I
FINISHED MEDICAL SCHOOL, BUT I BURNED OUT.
I was in unaccredited training and
working extremely long hours and it
became very difficult for me to see the end
of the road. I took a couple of months off
to decide what I wanted to do. Then I did
a rotation in anaesthetics and then another
rotation in ICU. I decided that ICU is
more in line with what I am interested in
and what I can really see myself doing in
the future, so I pivoted. I love the humanity
of medicine in critical care.
Women are often not taken seriously
when they say they’re in pain. I’ve certainly
seen that in my practice; medicine is
very gendered.
Incredibly, we’re only just starting
to recognise and accept that women
possibly or even probably react to pain in
a different way or have different needs.
There is a lot of research to show that a
lot of the things that we do in our clinical
practice is based on evidence or research
that was predominantly conducted on
male patients. The classic example is the
different ways women present with heart
attacks. Traditionally we look out for
chest pain, but women can present with
symptoms of indigestion. And then the
risk is, their diagnosis gets overlooked.
We might dismiss a woman’s response to
pain as overly emotional, whereas when
a man tells us he’s in pain, we think it’s
serious. We think, we have to get on top
of it! We need to shift our perspectives
- gender influences, and is influenced by,
the physical, psychological and social
lives of our patients; we have to be more
intentional in our practice of medicine.
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