Internal Medicine Personal Statement

“In every challenge, there lies an opportunity.” I have come to appreciate this simple yet profound statement on multiple occasions. One of those instances was my first day as a general practitioner. Directly after graduating from medical school, I had volunteered to work as an emergency physician at the hospital of the rural harbor city of Jask in south Iran, hundreds of miles away from home. The hospital served the city and all its neighboring villages with a total population of 80,000 and was known for its large volume of emergency room visits and inpatient admissions. I immediately noticed that this hospital lacked the very most basic facilities and equipment that were routinely available at all hospitals during my medical school clinical …show more content…
The integration of basic science with clinical medicine first caught my attention during preclinical physiopathology courses. It was however not until after a few months of clinical clerkship that I was able to fully appreciate the role of Internal Medicine as the backbone of medical sciences. I vividly remember how one of medical school mentors always told me that “an internist always investigates.” Internal medicine physicians rarely have the luxury of providing a quick cure for a relatively simple disease, but rather have the responsibility of managing diseases that affect a broad array of vital organs and systems. There are few other medical specialties, where one has the opportunity to be a leading member of a team of several physicians and support staff to treat the patient as a whole, both addressing the acute illness while at the same time managing multiple challenging chronic comorbidities. I still remember one of our patients who was admitted to the hospital because of complications of what was otherwise expected to be a routine appendectomy. She was a young woman who had subsequently developed several high output enterocutaneous fistulae after the surgery. While the surgical team had requested our help to manage the patient’s electrolyte imbalances, it was a thorough investigation of the patient’s medical history by our team that led to a gastroenterology consultation and eventual diagnosis of Crohn disease, which identified and helped us manage the root cause of the patient’s symptoms. Although I enjoyed all my clinical rotations, I have always found Internal Medicine to be the most rewarding and challenging. I truly believe that it is a great opportunity to be able to treat patients with a wide variety of complaints and ailments in a comprehensive