It occurred to me towards the end of our conversation that there was a large gaping hole.  We had talked about physician burnout, career choices, and his current plans.  He had drawn a map of his future.   It originally shot like a straight arrow towards clinical medicine, but now veered precipitously.  I took a moment to first clear my thoughts, and then my throat.

Medicine, I explained, is still as noble a profession as ever.  Every day I dip my toes tentatively into the current that swirls around me.  Often I am pulled violently into the depths.  My body bumps and sways in the mass of humanity.  Our rhythms join at times and depart at others.  Amongst the tumult my mind strains to unlock riddles, my hands reach forward pawing the Rubik’s Cube of disjointed anatomy laid bare on my table.

I am imperfect, and it is hard.  Maddening.  I sometimes curse my own feeble abilities.  Yet this profession offers the opportunity to be with our fellow humans.   Regardless of outcome.  It offers the ability to reach an imperfect hand towards a suffering soul.  Over and over again.  On weekends, on holidays, in the middle of the night.  When it’s inconvenient.  When it really matters.

You become the beacon of light to someone’s darkness.  The epitome of meaning, wrapped in a profession, crafted over years of practice.

There is nothing that I would rather do for a lifetime.  No profession more worthy.  No pastime more challenging.  No calling more sacred.

We suffer today not from a failure of training nor a mighty profession gone astray, but from the greedy, lecherous, and diabolical distortion foisted upon us.

We suffer from a government so mired in special interests that often the most simplified and logical tasks become overly burdensome.  Administrators with little knowledge of actual medical practice add layers of bureaucratic minutia on the backs of hapless workers.  Computer systems are generated with the wrongheaded idea of Big Data collection as they further warp severely strained processes.

We suffer from big business, hospitals, and insurers bent on squeezing every last cent from a system where they produce nothing.  They repackage the knowledge and ability of their clinicians, and slap a brand new inflated price tag.

And we suffer from ourselves. Our medical societies who pat our back with one hand while picking our pockets with the other.  Our physicians who have lost their way, and traded in this holy art for a chance to feast on the leftovers from the carcass of their debilitated brethren.

The doctors who value bloat, cruelty, over-testing, and over-diagnosis to add to their wealth and not the health of their patients.

Medicine can still be noble and worthy.

If society allows it.

If we fight for it.

Jordan Grumet is an internal medicine physician who blogs at In My Humble Opinion. Watch his talk at dotMED 2013, Caring 2.0: Social Media and the Rise Of The Empathic Physician. He is the author of I Am Your Doctor: and This Is My Humble Opinion.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com