Writing - The art of turning thoughts into sentences.
Art - The creative process of manifesting the unmanifested ideas.
At least this is what I think about them. Till now, I have only done non-artistic things in my life and medical education tops that list. The process of going through two of the hardest competitive exams of the country along with 5.5 years of gruelling long journey of cramming facts day in and out to get an MBBS degree is everything in the world but creative.
Being a doctor is prestigious and satisfying but it's also one of the most uncreative work ever. Everything from diagnosis to treatment is well structured with fixed algorithms in place to guide you into management leaving no room for imagination because a patient's life depends on it and evidence-based approach has much better chance of saving him than your imagination. There surely is a certain amount of art involved in diagnosing tricky diseases but even those cases are not an everyday phenomenon for most doctors.
Now the question, why I am trying to learn writing?
The answer to this is because of issues I am facing with medicine, which is mainly threefold - lack of individuality, impact, and legacy.
Individuality
Let's talk about individuality first.
The uncomfortable fact - you are always replaceable! If you don't prescribe chloroquine for malaria, some other doctor will. Will your absence matter much to the system? NO! and seriously that's not a very pleasant thing to realize for something requiring 10-15 years of extreme hard work from your life.
Artistic fields are completely different from this. Art is a creative process of manifesting the unmanifested, just like giving birth to a child. A mother can never give birth to the same child again, neither can any other mother copy the true essence of that child ever, that child will always remain unique, she may not become famous like Mona Lisa but she'll always be the lovely child of her mother, and she's surely not replaceable.
Impact
This can be seen via the number of lives touched while alive.
In India, a doctor usually starts practising by the age of 30 after completing all of his training. If we take a hypothetical scenario of seeing 200 patients a day daily for 50 years without any break, he'll be touching 36lakh lives in his entire life. Which is just 0.045% of the current world population!
Mind you, very few doctors see 200 patients a day, surgeons see much lesser than physicians and even all physicians don't see 200 patients a day.
Here we are also removing the fact that many of those 36lakh will be follow-up patients. Also, more than 99% of the patients won't be coming with life-threatening problems, those patients will be moved towards trauma surgeons and emergency medicine doctors. Who see much lesser patients(not more than 25%) than a normal doctor but their impact is much bigger on a patient's life.
So it's an inverse relation between the magnitude of impact a doctor has to the number of lives he touches. Bigger the impact, lesser the lives touched(even lesser than 36 lakh).
An artist on the other hand can touch the entire world with unimaginable impact on individual lives. Obviously, there can be nothing compared to saving a life but art is actually the one that makes the life worth living. Saving a life is huge but that single book or movie which changed your perceptions about life, which made you grow, which made you become a better person, or lead you to a journey of self-discovery, isn't also anything less.
Legacy
The idea is not to live forever but to create something that will.
That something is value. If something adds value to people's lives, it'll keep living in the world and you'll be remembered for it.
Doctors are not very fortunate in this scenario. If a practising physician dies, he's remembered for some time by his patients, family, and people of nearby area max. This legacy doesn't run for more than 50 years because it's more of a memory of service than a value in people's lives.
Services do get recognized as part of legacy but that usually happens in life death scenarios of the highest order, like for a soldier, or in case of a politician or social worker impacting millions via their service(again impact).
From a doctor's perspective of legacy, there are two broad choices.
First is to create some new treatment or, something of value in the field of medical science which can be used repeatedly without your active involvement. Once created it'll be used continuously even after your life(till some new and better thing comes up to replace it). But this will be more of a role of a scientist, or of an entrepreneur in case of a start-up, than a doctor.
Second to start a big hospital that keeps on serving people even after your death and your name keeps going on with it, but this will come in business avenue again than of being a doctor.
Even these two are not timeless, creative arts survive through centuries, but old researches are replaced constantly by new ones and no business empire lasts forever. Art is the only way to live forever in the memory of people.
Conclusion
If you have reached till here you must be thinking that I am a very pessimistic type of person who isn't very passionate about his field, but trust me that's not the case. I have always wanted to do something greater, to touch the lives of millions of people positively, to leave some great legacy behind which keeps on adding value to their lives forever but to achieve all that, medicine alone is leaving me wanting.
Out of all the possible creative ways of expression, writing seems to be the only thing I can try my hand on, so that's what I am doing right now. I am not completely sure if this is what i seriously want to do or if I am genuinely passionate about it, I guess writing for some time continuously will give me those answers, but it surely does have that immense potential to take me to places where medicine alone never can.
PS-This is my first noobie article as part of this new hobby, this could be used as a benchmark to check my writing progress further down the line. Let's see where I'll reach, hope you'll enjoy being a part of this journey. :)
Next article soon!