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“We do not have to continue to blame external forces for the stresses upon us now. By organizing, mobilizing, and finding solutions to the problems facing us and our adopted community today, we can meet the current challenge to be of help, however we can. Perhaps, in this way, we can stop making pandemics a future generation’s problem to solve, and instead become the leaders we once needed ourselves.”
Pratik Doshi is a medical student.
He shares his story and discusses the KevinMD article that he co-wrote, “The opportunities for medical students in a pandemic.”
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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.
Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Pratik Doshi. He’s a medical student, and he co-wrote the KevinMD article “The opportunities for medical students in a pandemic.” Pratik, welcome to the show.
Pratik Doshi: Thank you, Kevin. Really, really happy to be here with you.
Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into the article in a bit, but first off, can you share your story and your journey to where you are today?
Pratik Doshi: Yeah, sure thing. So I’m a current fourth-year medical student at Duke University School of Medicine. I’m originally from Southern California. I grew up in Cerritos, California, and went to undergrad at the University of Southern California, so really a SoCal boy, I would say. I was a public health major over there and then did a master’s in global medicine and entrepreneurship, but I have always been interested in the intersection between how you can take advantage of public health situations and really apply creative and innovative solutions to addressing those. So that’s kind of been my background.
When I came to Duke, now as a fourth year, I spent a research year doing research in global health innovation and improving health care access around the world. So I’ve been working with large funding organizations and a couple of other things. And with the COVID-19 situation, things have been upended in every part of the world and every part of, especially, medical education. So it’s been a really interesting time, especially as somebody with a background in public health, to see different countries’ responses to it, and also how the medical schools have responded, and how students themselves have kind of stepped up and almost taken a leadership role during this pandemic.
Kevin Pho: Let’s get into that. How have medical students taken a leadership role during the pandemic?
Pratik Doshi: Yeah, so when we first wrote the article, it had only been a couple of weeks. But since everything had shut down, basically your entire medical education had been abandoned. For first- and second-year med students, who are normally used to meeting their classmates in a large lecture hall and showing up to anatomy lab or pathology lab, all of that stuff was canceled. So one, it was difficult for them to move everything online, and that, I think, really interrupted the medical school process.
For third- and fourth-year students, who are normally on the wards, most students were removed from clinical experiences and had to somehow find ways to supplement their learning. It also became difficult, I think, for medical schools, because they couldn’t graduate students, knowing that they didn’t have certain core requirements or core experiences, and certify them as competent physicians, or competent students with medical doctorate degrees, unless they had those experiences.
So in tussling with all that, I think med students realized that we need to take an active role in shaping our education. One, because we’re more familiar with an online format, and two, because we also interface with, I think, both sides of things. We’re talking to physicians and doctors in the hospital, but we’re also living in, quote unquote, the real world, and we see how other people are responding to this pandemic.
So it was a really interesting time, I think, for med students, because on one end, with daily changing practices, and we’ve been having these conversations about burnout and depression for so long, the pandemic really put a lot of pressure on the hospital system and a lot of the mentors and physicians we look up to. On the other end, we saw a society where people were hoarding PPE, where people weren’t sharing, where misinformation was rampant, and there was no real unified leadership, especially within the U.S.
And so as med students, you’re kind of seeing those two things, and you’re like, “There needs to be something. There needs to be some sort of connection here. We need to be able to bridge that gap.” And I think that’s really where med students that I’ve seen, and myself, have been involved and have kind of stepped up.
So med students have organized drives to collect PPE and donate it to hospitals. They’ve worked with allied health professions to do campaigns in the community to increase awareness. I’ve seen so many people in the health care professions post on social media about flattening the curve, about wearing masks, about sharing appropriate information. So it’s really been an incredible response, almost a ground-level or a grassroots response, at combating a lot of the misinformation and a lot of the issues that we were seeing at a societal level.
And so as med students, seeing that, it’s almost inspiring, and we wanted to get involved. So when we were co-writing the article “The opportunities for medical students in a pandemic,” we were kind of at the very beginning of that wave, and now it’s even progressed to much more than that, and people have really, really contributed in meaningful ways.
Kevin Pho: So if you’re a medical student and you’re looking to take part in some of these leadership opportunities, is there any organization, is there anywhere that you could look online in terms of how that medical student can take that leadership role?
Pratik Doshi: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think, first, there are two parts to that. One, look internally within your medical school would be my advice there. I’m sure there are a lot of students who are doing a lot of active things to contribute to the community, to combat the spread of misinformation, to reinforce the health system itself. So I would really encourage you to look into what opportunities already exist, but also look at where the gaps exist.
So for example, I lead a group of students over at Duke called the Duke University Benefits Enrollment Center Fellows. I know it’s a little bit of a mouthful of a name, but what we essentially do is, pre-COVID, we used to provide preventative health screenings to low-income community members. We’d go do blood pressure, BMI, glucose, do some nutrition education. But because the pandemic shut down a lot of the food pantries and a lot of the community centers that low-income populations normally interface with, we had to adapt what we wanted to do.
So we called our community partners, we talked to administrators at Duke, and we’re like, “How can we still contribute to Durham and the overall Duke community?” And so instead, we got in touch with a couple of low-income senior housing complexes, and we got together a group of student volunteers who are now making weekly calls to almost a thousand residents, low-income senior residents, asking them about food insecurity, asking them about transportation, asking them about how they’re doing with their medications, answering questions about COVID, and just doing general well-call checks and making sure that we do our part in keeping that senior loneliness at bay.
So it’s been an incredible thing, and we’ve seen this thing scale from one housing complex calling 40 people to now almost a thousand people across Durham. So that’s been really exciting. We’re also working with the health system right now; we’re setting up COVID testing sites in low-income areas across Durham, which has been really exciting.
And so I think the really cool part is, as you get more involved in this, more and more opportunities keep coming up. And so for med students, I think looking at where there are gaps and, if nothing else exists, stepping in and asking questions, I think, is the big thing. We were lucky that we had some of these relationships with community partners already set up. But for anyone who’s trying to do something or have a positive impact, really involving the community beyond whoever your immediate circle of support is, is a really critical step in also addressing the needs of the community.
So I think there are plenty of ways to get involved, and there are a lot of things that you can do. And there are also national-level organizations now. There’s this national health student council that essentially has a region in every part of the country and has student leaders from medical schools and other health professional schools helping set up volunteer opportunities. So there are a lot of ways that people can get involved and really contribute, and it’s just a matter of putting your foot out there and seeing what you like and seeing which way you can give back.
Kevin Pho: One of the things that you mentioned earlier was the proliferation of misinformation online. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how medical students can help with that issue?
Pratik Doshi: Yeah, so as I’m sure you’re aware, and probably a lot of your readers are aware, not to make this a political conversation, but there’s been a lot of pushback from the Trump administration and from other officials that kind of negates a lot of the public health knowledge that we commonly accept within the medical community and within the public health community, one being wearing masks and social distancing and all that.
Even in my home state of California, there are areas where people are walking around without masks, not following social distancing orders, and that can become really frustrating as a health provider. Especially, I don’t know how familiar you are with the graph, but we were actually doing pretty well in May, where the case numbers were starting to drop. We were quarantining well. Things were actually starting to look really good. But because, I think, we cut back on those restrictions a little too early, those case numbers have shot up much higher than they were even in March or April.
In terms of combating misinformation, one, I think, is understanding where people are hearing the areas of misinformation or types of misinformation. And a lot of that is coming from social media, from articles that are basically negating a lot of the literature that we talk about. And then making the information that we have available addressable to a larger audience.
So when physicians talk to each other, we use a certain type of vernacular. When scientists talk to each other, we use very specific terms. But when you communicate that to a larger audience, you need to make things more visually appealing. You need to not only show them the graph but kind of give them the short and sweet picture.
So I think that’s where the younger generation of medical students and health professional students are really, really addressing it, in the sense that they’re creating those types of catchy messages and catchy slogans, hashtags and trending things on Twitter and other social media platforms, and really helping steer the conversation towards better information, towards showing people what the data is.
For example, you may have seen online the picture of the transmission rates between people who are not wearing masks, between one person who’s wearing a mask versus two people who are wearing masks, and then two people wearing a mask, then social distancing. That type of visual graphic communicates information within one or two seconds, versus the chart from JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine, where that data probably originated from. If somebody just posted a picture of the NEJM graph, that might communicate something to you or me, but it’s not going to communicate something to the lay person.
So I really think, as a medical community, we need to think: How do we focus our data and our message for the lay person? How do we transmit information effectively, quickly, and on platforms that most people are going to interface with?
Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Pratik Doshi. He’s a medical student, and he co-wrote the KevinMD article “The opportunities for medical students in a pandemic.” My final question: What’s your take-home message that you can share with the other medical students who may be listening to this podcast?
Pratik Doshi: Yeah, Kevin, I think that’s a great question. My big take-home message is get involved. Get out there. There are a lot of things that you can do, and across the spectrum, you can be as little involved as you want or as much as you want. But there are things that you can do to make a positive impact, and it’s all about just making that first step and getting out there.
Kevin Pho: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thank you for being on the show.
Pratik Doshi: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
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