July 15, 2012
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GI Fellowship Personal Statement-Open Critique…
Hey all, so I am in the midst of finishing up my application to GI Fellowship and would greatly appreciate your help in reading and critiquing my personal statement. Please feel free to be as brutally honest, detail oriented, grammar nazi or what have you as you want. Anything that can make this better and help me get my fellowship is well worth any potential hurt feelings you think you might get. Positive feedback appreciated too of course =)
“I didnt know people could turn that color” I thought to myself as I looked at the patient in bed 32b, his skin a diseased shade of yellow I had previously only seen in the spice section at my local ethnic market.
“How good is your spanish” the resident asked me, and I answered that I considered myself pretty fluent for a non-native speaker. Good, the resident replied. I need to you come in and help me tell this patient that he has liver cancer. “Well, um, alright.” I responded nervously, “but first I need to look up the words for jaundice, liver, and cancer.”
While my medical spanish has considerably improved from that first interaction, the importance of good communication between doctor and patient has been only one of many lessons that patient taught me. Here was a man who had never touched a drink in his life, and still had managed to develop fatty liver, and subsequently, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. And at every step of the way, gastroenterologists were involved in his care, from his initial diagnosis via biopsy to coordinating with the transplant surgeons who gave him a second chance at life.
During medical school I spent a month in China studying traditional Chinese medicine including acupuncture, moxibustion, cupping, and the use of herbs to treat many maladies. The use of these herbs is astonishing and my primary interest area in research, fusing eastern and western medicine. Already spices like turmeric and ginger are making strides in treating conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, clostridium difficile infection and being used as promotility agents.
While in Residency, as a result of my interest in liver patients, I became involved in a study related to the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) and treatments associated with liver transplant patients. This study was published in the February 2011 issue of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology and presented in Miami in Jan. 2011 at The AGA Clinical Congress of Gastroenterology and Hepatology: Best Practices in 2011. Currently I am involved in a pilot study evaluating the effects of turmeric on non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. Should the results prove significant, it could offer a new treatment for a hitherto untreatable condition.
The majority of health problems outside the United States are often gastrointestinal or infectious in origin and quite frequently both. Knowledge of the diagnosis and treatment of GI bleeds, hepatitis and a host of other intestinal anomalies gives me an incredible set of tools with which I could ultimately travel with a team of specialists, to treat underserved populations around the world. Perhaps I could even learn of new herbs and procedures to bring back to my patients at home, once again fusing techniques manual and technical, eastern and western, old and new.
I love gastroenterology because it offers me the best of all worlds: Procedures such as egd,ercp, and eus to not only diagnose but often immediately treat GI problems; and continuity of care with chronic diseases such as hepatits or inflammatory bowel disease where I am able to follow and build a lasting relationship with my patients.
-Dr J
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Comments (3)
My mother who has never been educated in her life (unless you count ESL classes in America ‘educated’) hoards a ton of herbal knowledge, esp. plants and roots in GI problems. Some of these plants are native to only S.E. Asia, but it’s surprising that she can home treat so many different types of GI problems without any medical knowledge. She could touch your stomach and tell you what your problem is. How right she is, is beyond me and only medical testing can really prove anything, but I have seen it give people at least some temporarily relief [of their GI problems]. However, my husband is against herbal treatment and prefers scientific/medical treatments (because he’s a pharmacist), but I grew up with lots of herbal medicine so I don’t completely rule it out as a remedy. I think GI is a good area to go into. Good luck.
Nice, I would hire you. Go for it!
I am impressed with the presentation. But remember I know nothing about the medical profession other than the directions given me by my primary doctor to loose weight.