Petrichor-doux

After a long drought, I'm ready to rain down some sweet rain in the form of some blogging.

I’m finished with my first year of med school, which makes me 25% MD. At this point, we've adjusted to the idea of accumulating $250k in debt. There's no turning back now. We're all going to be doctors. What isn't clear is what the hell that actually means in the grand scheme of things.

The waters have been muddied by the biomedical scientific flurry of information that has been forced into our brains. Many fresh MDs admit that, during your preparation for board exams at the end of your second year, you will have the ability to recall greater fundamental medical details than you will for the duration of your practicing years.

But one thing that can't be instilled in us is a sense of purpose. Since my time on Semester at Sea, I've felt some calling to the world, though I still don't know where I'm heading. Other friends that pursued medicine have described how the process has beaten the altruism out of them. My friend at Harvard Dental - who also happens to have been on the Semester at Sea voyage with me - told me that he held an altruistic view of dentistry until very recently. Now, he merely hopes to achieve a comfortable life for himself while performing his job as best possible. This is coming from a guy that has devoted a great deal of his time over the past years to servicing the poor.

I'm on a path to change the way that we think about health. The current stream of thinking in society is that our bodies either work well or they don't, which, in my opinion, isn't really a terrible way to simplify things. On the other hand, take, for example, the study of epigenetics. A great deal of research is now focused on how factors in our environment – including pollution, diet, and exercise – affects the expression of our genome. All of these things can influence the way that we feel and perform.

Cancer is a dysfunction that arises from within the body itself. It deals with the uninhibited division of cells, a process that is highly regulated in a normal cell. This dysfunction is usually the result of damage to genes that regulate cell division. Free radicals or some DNA-damaging agent such as radiation causes this damage. While inheritance of certain cancers must be mitigated by our role as physicians, providing the tools for people to minimize this damage by reducing the stresses on our bodies that cause them. Epigenetics research has shown that these agents range dramatically…from the food we eat to the amount of time that we spend on our cell phones.

This isn't about money, politics, economics, or health care policy. This is a throw back to what makes life possible. We must do our best to preserve our bodies. It’s the only way to optimize our wellness in spite of a poor genetic hand. The food, sleep levels, stress levels, and activity that we constantly expose our bodies to can and will affect gene transcription, and thus alter our mood, energy levels, focus, and general well-being.

A recent lecturer suggested we decide now where our interest lies in medicine: taking care of sick apples or preventing apples from getting sick in the first place. While care for already sick patients is critical, I think that we as medical professionals owe it to society to begin taking prevention more seriously. Considering the potential of epigenetics, this battle is not solely against obesity. It’s a battle to preserve our wellness and morbidity by devoting more resources and energy to mapping out an optimal way of life most appropriate for maintaining the integrity of our genome.