Stress in Medical School

It's been an unusually quiet Friday afternoon at Logan Regional Hospital, when its ambulance arrives and delivers Jim, a 57 year-old male. Only minutes before, Jim was involved in a violent car accident in which his lung was punctured and he had developed severe internal bleeding. In just moments the relatively calm room bursts into disorder as Jim is wheeled in. His muffled cries of pain are heard, while other patients gasp when they see the awful scene of Jim covered in his own blood. Nurses scramble to get things ready for the immediate surgery that will be required. Just at this moment, Doctor Gillespie enters the emergency room. Though chaos reigns throughout the room, he brings with him a tranquil influence. He calmly, yet firmly, gives commands to nurses and others to best prepare Jim for his up coming operation. As Jim is wheeled into the operating room, Dr. Gillespie took a second to take a deep breath. In medical school, Dr. Gillespie learned the proper procedures of how to best help patients in these circumstances. Another crucial lesson he learned, like all medical students, was how to work during these stressful situations. Because of the many years spent in medical training, Dr. Gillespie knew he'd be able to help Jim recover.

It would be an understatement to say that schooling to become a doctor is stressful and hard. The medical education must be intense and demanding to weed out the unmotivated and the unprepared. With critical decisions in life and death circumstances, doctors must be able to make the correct choices without buckling under the tremendous pressure.

Working with stress is nothing new for doctors. Each one of them got a healthy dose of that during their four years of medical school. Their education continues as they have three to five years of residency training in a hospital. Neal A. Whitman, who did a study on student stress said, "Premedical education in college is in itself stressful because of the keen competition to get into medical school." The application process for medical school is a "grueling process, with many sections of multiple applications, many essays to write, and many interviews." Not only does it take a lot of time to apply, but the requirements for acceptance are high. An undergraduate degree is required with a high GPA as well a great score on the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT).

Once accepted into medical school, the stress grows. "A major stressor for first-year medical students is the amount and complexity of material to be learned." The curriculum for the first year consists of in-depth courses on the development, structure and functions of the human body. During the first year, "students feel academic pressure because nearly all their classmates were superior college students." These students are used to earning the highest grades in their undergraduate classes, and now they are just average compared to the other medical students. "It is not unusual to find your first year of medical school intense and difficult. Many students discover themselves struggling through the strenuous academics, and some do not pass the final exams." Getting these lower scores on tests and the competitiveness in medical school can add a large amount of anxiety on these students.

Whitman discussed some other stressors that face medical students in later years of schooling. "Fatigue is often cited as a stressor in the second year, and many researchers describe a hypochondriacal phenomenon by which medical students imagine they have the disease they are studying." During the third year, medical students start working some with patients. A cause of stress for these students is how well they can witness and accept the death of people that they have worked with and cared for.

After the four years of medical school, all students go on to become a resident in a hospital, where they will get the most training in their chosen specialty. "Students don't concentrate solely on their own area of specialty until their second year of residency. Generally they rotate through different specialties or areas within one specialty during the first year of residency." Yet again, it's no bed of roses during this time either. "The three years of residency following med school (and an extra year of internship for anyone wishing to specialize) are well-known to be the toughest years of your medical education." Jared Aelony, a second-year resident at Oakwood Hospital in Detroit explained, "Your superiors can be pretty rough on you, because once you leave to go into practice, it means you've got their seal of approval, and they really want that to mean something. They want to harden you to things so you'll be able to deal with the situations that you're eventually going to be faced with"

Along with the "tough love" from their supervisors, resident's typical work weeks range from 50 to 80 hours a week. Several nights a week they are on-call, staying overnight at the hospital keeping an eye on everybody's patients while trying to get some sleep on a cot in the back room.

Medical school and residency training is demanding in every aspect. It is possible and very important to have a life outside of school. This can be done on a consistent basis as well. Some medical students say it's best to study a few hours each day, instead of cramming right before a test. This will greatly reduce stress by helping them to do better on tests and by giving them some free time each week to go and do other social activities. Becoming acquainted with other students and residents will help by giving them others to study and learn with. Having this kind of "social network is key to balancing your work and home life, especially when your work life weighs as heavily as that of a resident's: 'Whatever little simple pleasures you can have outside of the hospital are good things,' says Aelony."