Privilege

One thing that annoys the Fuddled medic is people who don’t appreciate how lucky they are. At some stage (or quite regularly) medical students will get bored sitting in clinics staring at the back of the ophthalmologists head or standing in theatre. All medical students should be acutely aware that if they don’t really want to be there, many hundreds of other students would jump to have that opportunity.

Perhaps this is why the Fuddled Medic gets annoyed when she see’s other students skipping stuff. The time you skip a nursing shift or a clinic is a time that could be given to someone else. On a personal note there are clinics that were inspiring but the FM could only go to one due to other students being roistered in. The FM could have gone twice if she had known other students weren’t going to turn up.

So why the title of this blog post? One problem is that a significant proportion of people who got medical school come from a background where they have everything handed to them on a plate. How can you appreciate medical school when you have had to do relatively little work to get in? If you’ve been told what’s going to appear in exams, you’ve been coached in ethics, you’ve had lectures put on for you by the school, you’ve been coached on how to answer interview questions?

Does this post make me bitter? Or is it a valid observation? Certainly I don’t want a class war. And the Fuddled Medic has many good friends who went to private school, the difference being they appreciate how lucky they are.