Will the best medic please stand up?

It's easy to start believing that you're the best kind of medic there is when you slog through the hardships of your study and have those definitive experiences.

I remember one of the lecturers saying, "You guys will be the last resort for many of your patients. They'll have been to see three different GPs, a chiropractor, a homeopath, someone will have put them on some weird diet, and then they'll come to you, after everything else has failed. You'll get the most difficult cases out there - and if you pay attention, you'll be able to help them." Or something like that.

Then I looked around the room at the other first-year students and noticed that our average age was about thirty and that I was in my late twenties. "We've got life experience," I told myself. "What does someone who's never been outside a medical career know about the pressures the rest of the world faces? We know what it's like to be a patient, struggling with a doctor who treats you like an idiot - we're not going to fall into that trap."

There's nothing like a multidisciplinary environment to teach a little humility. The paramedics have an ECG trace on their noticeboard that they're supposed to decipher - I know enough to know that a healthy person doesn't produce that kind of trace, but no more than that. I discover that their practical test consists of walking into the prac lab and then 'handling it'. They don't even get told how many casualties will be there in advance - just like they won't know in real life.

A homeopath (one of those quacks) chats to me over lunch and takes a deep look into my eyes - the tiny lesions on my iris suggest chest pain to him, do I have any? Yes I do.

The thing we don't have at my campus is physicians, so it's easy to maintain a sense of superiority there. Until you start reading their blogs, anyway. It turns out that they're not robots following a rigid set of protocols after all. Their workloads are impossible - except for the fact that they make them possible somehow. And they're face-to-face with death, unlike folks like me who get the job of treating back pain that hasn't improved over five years, and isn't going anywhere soon.

As the senior lecturer said, "If I get hit by a car, don't take me to the Chinese medicine doctor, get me to a hospital! Over the months that follow, when I'm trying to rebuild my strength, then take me to the Chinese medicine doctor, so that I can recover more quickly."

Let's hear it for the best kind of medic - the one that helps their patient, whatever system of medicine they practice.