Hello my new friends! I am so glad to become a part of steemit community. As time will go, I will share more of my personal stories but for now here is my journey into medicine to become a radiologist.
As I peered into the thorax of my cadaver during the first days of medical school, I recalled our prior radiology lecture on the chest radiograph. I stood there, looking over the radiograph in my manual and back at the thorax, trying to overlay the two in my mind. It was at that moment that my first real interest in radiology was sparked—in the first month of medical school during our intensive anatomy course. The daytime hours not spent in dissection lab were spent in radiology correlation sessions and what our school termed “living anatomy.” During these sessions, radiologists introduced us to the application of the anatomy we had learned in our dissection lab to the practicality of diagnostic imaging. Being a new medical student hungry for knowledge, I was amazed at how much information radiologists were able to extract from what, at the time to me, looked like mere black, white, and grey shadows. There was something undoubtedly brilliant and powerful about the process and I wanted to know more.
I witnessed first-hand how often the medical teams relied on the radiologist’s abilities and diagnostic input in order to determine a treatment plan. The interdisciplinary nature of being a “doctor's doctor” appeals to me as there exists a deep sense of trust and integrity between the treating physician and radiologist that leads to an accurate diagnosis. Additionally, studying the subtleties of images and transforming them into a diagnosis is fulfilling to me on an intellectual level. There is an exciting intellectual challenge associated with radiology’s ability to bring together technology with a vast understanding of anatomy, physiology and pathology of a disease in order to treat patients and optimize medical care. In a world that is increasingly reliant on science and technology, it is true that much of both the diagnostic and therapeutic future of medicine lies with diagnostic imaging and the constant technological advances associated with it.