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What do Medicine and High School have in Common?

The other day my internal medicine research team met up at the project lead’s office and we walked over to a conference (eight pairs dress clogs go clomp clomp clomp) that was then occupied by a research team. They were running over the time they had signed up for. We stood outside, waiting for them to finish, perhaps talking louder to let them know we were here. Sure enough, realizing their time was up, the other team collected themselves around the door and …opened it…and then…we saw…they were…(wait for it)…surgeons.

I—being the most junior member of my team and standing the farthest back—saw all the expressions, of internists and surgeons, flicker from casual to something approximating dyspeptic back to casual. The medical teams filed past each other and I swear that if someone had started snapping rhythmically we all would have launched into an internists-versus-surgeons competitive musical a lá West Side Story.

But sadly, there was no symphony playing Sondheim, no balletic pseudo-combat in which the surgeons pirouetted with scalpels while the internists struck arabesques with stethoscopes, and no Romeo & Juliet inspired star-crossed love story between the two houses of surgery and internal medicine.

Alas for that.

Because any of those things would have been more interesting that the discussion of data collection and statistical analysis that followed.

I had known for two years now, during my pre-clinical years, that medical school was like traveling back through time to high school. We have lockers, gossip, prom. Yes, prom. And I have to say, it’s pretty awesome. Turns out the whole sordid affair of tuxedos and boutonnieres is a lot more hilarious at 29 than it was at 19. Anyway, now that I’m in a research year, and seeing such interesting interactions as the one written above I’m beginning to see that, in some ways, the similarities between teen life and medicine aren’t really going to stop with medical school. Here’s an incomplete list of the things landing in overlap in the Venn Diagram of High School and Medicine.

1) Stratified Social Hierarchy

• Seniors are cooler than juniors.

2) Self Identifying Cliques

• When my old high school buddy turned financial guru asked me what an internist is, I tried to explain the concept of general internal medicine and was getting nowhere. Then I said “Like JD on Scrubs. Not like Turk.” He said, “So…not the jocks? More like the chess team?” I thought about arguing this but didn’t know if there was a point. We left it at that.

3) Gray’s Anatomy

• Please God, let this one change soon.

4) Archaic Dialects Written in Acronyms

• The average adult is rapidly gaining fluency in txtspk and perhaps would appreciate that the phrase “You can’t wait to workout until tomorrow? This surprises me very much!” might easily be rendered into “U can’t w8 2 wrkut until 2mro? AYFKMe?”
• OTOH, the average adult will likely be less amused to discover that should they wish to write the phrase “An older Black gentleman showed up at the clinic today worried because he has a itchy rash on the back of his hand that he’s scratched until it’s started to bleed,” would be rendered into something like “64YO AAM P/W dermatitis on dorsum of R hand C/B excoriations 2/2 pruitus.” Yeah, like, for serious.

5) Experimentation with Drugs

• No. Not in the same way. We hope.