Description
Every year the most successful students in the pre-university examinations choose medicine as their favoured course to pursue. Yet, a British Medical Journal survey in 2001, shown in tables 1 and 2, found that 60% of doctors around the world report being unhappy or very unhappy(1). Is this because the students studying medicine had gone on a dark unknown road, and they did not like the villages and towns the road took them through? If students were to understand better what life as a doctor entails, would this reduce the number of unhappy doctors? If young doctors understand the many career options available, would they be less unhappy?
This then is the intention of this book to try to shed light on this dark unknown road for the student, their parents and the recently graduated doctor. It is not our intention to discourage the traveler, nor should we glorify the places one passes by along this road. By describing what we know life to be as practicing doctors, we may be showing medical students and young doctors what their own life might be, and hope they will be better able to decide if this is the road they really wish to travel on.
Our writers are mainly doctors practicing in Penang, and the book is a publication of the Penang Medical Practitioners' Society, the oldest medical society in Malaysia founded in 1932. We are fortunate that our efforts have received the enthusiastic support of eminent university academicians, and our contributors include the Deans of the medical faculties of the International Medical University (IMU) and the Science University of Malaysia (USM), as well as a senior Professor of the National University of Singapore, and a clinical professor of the University of Hong Kong. In 2002, Penang had 1,353 doctors, and a doctor. population ratio of 1:1028 (2). The health standard of a community is often shown by its infant mortality rate (IMR). This tells of the number of deaths within their first year of life for every 1000 live babies born. The better the health standard, the lower would be the IMR. Similarly, a high IMR shows that the health standard in that community needs improving. The IMR in Penang in 2002 was 6.5 per 1000 live births. The IMR in Washington DC in 2002 was 11.5 per 1000 live births, while the IMR for the Caucasian population in the whole United States was 5.8 per 1000 live births (3). And so you notice that the success and quality of medical practice is measured by how well death and suffering is reduced, and not by how big the car or how large the house of the medical doctor.
ISBN:9789839901832
