Why I Left Medicine (And Why I'm Going Back)

hey friends welcome back to the channel this is going to be a little bit of a rambly video where i explain the thought process behind why i left medicine and quit being a doctor about six months ago and why my mind has now changed and i'm now moving back into the medical world if that sounds like it might be up your street then grab a cup of tea and we can we can talk about it if not that's totally cool lots of other more valuable videos on this channel and elsewhere on the internet and off the internet so feel free to skip this one if you like so let's start with a little bit of context uh if you have a life and you haven't been following my kind of life trajectory very very carefully basically from 2012 to 2018 i was a medical student at cambridge university 2017 i started this youtube channel in my final fifth year final year of medical school and then for two years after that 2018 through to august 2020 i was working as a foundation year doctor in the east anglia region of the uk now when we work as junior doctors as foundation year doctors we don't have a specialty at that point we are rotating amongst lots of different specialties to try and figure out what specific thing in medicine we'd like to do in america the closest thing would be an intern and the idea is after these two years we then make a decision as to what specialty or residency we don't really call it residency but that's what the american system is what specialty we want to go into at that point we can decide do we want to go for internal medicine or do we want to go for surgery or do we want to go for some run-through specialties like psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology and like neurosurgery and this is a pretty big decision because this decision about which specialty you want to go into really dictates a huge chunk of your life it like dictates who you spend your time with what you do maybe even who you marry maybe who you me who your friends are like it's like a ridiculously important decision and so in the uk what the majority of doctors do is that after the first two years of the foundation program we will take a break and a lot of people take a year out sometimes two sometimes three to explore other interests so let's say i thought i wanted to go into surgery but i thought i'm not really sure i want some more experience for a year i could spend it doing extra shifts in a local hospital or going to australia and doing some surgery stuff or maybe doing a research project in surgery and then at the end of my year i'll be able to decide you know what is surgery for me i'm now going to officially apply to a surgery training program and so for me this gap this sort of two-year mark came at august 2020 where i had to decide okay do i want to go straight into a training program or do i want to take a break from medicine and do something else crucially you actually make this decision about a year in advance so in august 2019 i had to decide a year from now do i think i want to go directly into specialty training or instead do i want to take a break from medicine and do something else and in august 2019 when i made this decision my plan was i definitely want to take some time out of medicine and i liked the idea of traveling to different countries around the world i like the idea of maybe going to australia to do some emergency medicine stuff at the time i was also dabbling with the idea of maybe moving to america instead and so i was thinking okay come august 2020 i'm going to take a year out and then i'll be able to prepare for my usmle and do all this kind of stuff and so really this decision that i made to take a break from medicine to leave medicine was made absolutely ages ago but it's just like because it just takes so long for the application process to happen it ended up being august 2020 where i kind of left the job when my two years ended i'm giving you the specific timeline because i've had occasional comments on instagram saying that how can you feel okay with leaving medicine in the middle of a pandemic there's a lot to unpack there um but the main one honestly is that i i chose to make that decision to leave medicine way before the pandemic was even a thing and this is just how the system works in the uk you apply for training a whole year before you actually start training and so me and most of my friends chose not to go straight into into a training program this was before we knew the pandemic was a thing the other reasons as to my thoughts around kind of leaving medicine in the middle of a pandemic i will say for later in the video where i talk about why i'm going back but in terms of the background context that's one reason why i left medicine because it's a very natural logistical career gap when you're in the uk it's not like we think hey screw medicine i'm going to leave i'm going to quit it's more like two years down the line you're like okay cool i've got a natural career gap where i now need to decide what specialty to go into i'm not 100 sure of that decision yet therefore let's take a step back let's hop off the kind of rotating treadmill of medical training programs and let's assess where i want my life to go so that was the logistical part i think the slightly more interesting part at least for me about why i chose to leave medicine you know six months ago is because like i really really really wasn't sure what specialty i wanted to go into number one and b i wasn't even sure if i wanted to stay in medicine at all this decision to go to med school was a decision that i made round about the age of 16 when i was choosing my a level exams and because medical school is such a competitive admissions process often people make that decision even before that point so like from the age of 13 and 14 i sort of had in the back of my mind that i might want to go to med school and so i started doing like st john's ambulance and volunteering for stuff and just trying to get my my kind of resume up to the point where i could have a competitive medical school application now one thing that my mom gets really pissed off about is like you know you decided to do medicine why are you not now seeing it through and the thing that i always say is that look i made this decision when i was like in my mid teens and it's now been like 12 years since i've made the decision to do medicine and i think it's pretty unreasonable to expect a decision made at the age of 14 15 or 16 where you really don't know like i had no idea what other careers were out there like my mom's a doctor my a few people in my family are doctors when you're asian and you have good grades it's just like a standard thing and like most most of my friends parents or doctors it's hard to know like genuinely when you're in that position what other possible careers are out there i knew i could be a doctor i could be a vet i could be a lawyer an engineer and i really didn't have much scope for like what other career paths out there and it was only really when i was like 17 and friends of mine in school were applying to study history or english or maths i mean like why are you studying history they were like because i like history and i used to think like what can you do with a history degree like surely all you can do with a history degree is be a history teacher uh and which is obviously not true there's like sort of thousands of different jobs you could go into but me sitting there at age 14 to 16 i really didn't know that these kind of jobs existed that's not to say that if i had known i would have changed my mind and i still think the decision to go to med school was one of the best things ever and i don't regret a moment of it but in some ways i kind of prefer the american system here where you kind of go through high school you go through college and then you decide what you want to well you know what you want your postgraduate qualification to be because at that point you have a little bit more life experience you've tried a few more things whereas here in the uk we have to decide at the age of 16. you know what you want your whole like career trajectory to look like and i i personally don't want to be welded to a decision that i made when i was 16 and i don't want that decision to necessarily shape the rest of my life unless i decide that it's actively what i want to do and to be honest throughout medical school as well like i knew that it wasn't medicine itself that brought me fulfillment and joy and meaning the things that brought me for film and joy and meaning were number one teaching i used to really really really enjoy teaching and i still do and that's one of the most meaningful experiences that i have personally and secondly the thing that i enjoyed while in med school was building businesses on the side and coding and like doing website design and like launching a business and building a question bank and learning server-side scripting and like that sort of stuff that was what really brought me joy in medical school rather than the work that i was doing itself equally for the two years that i was working as a doctor yeah the work was fun and it was nice hanging out with work colleagues but really the thing that was driving me there was like looking forward to coming home so that i could work on my youtube channel or i could work on my businesses and there was a nice quote that i came across which is that which was along the lines of you know the thing that you think about in the shower should be the thing that you do with your life and if i think about like what the sorts of stuff i think in the shower it's never about medicine it is always about like my side businesses or my youtube channel or my website or you know that sort of stuff and so at the time when i was making this decision about do i want to go straight into a medical training program this was really weighing on me this idea that you know i made this decision 10 years ago to go to med school and i don't want to look back at my life kind of 30 years from now and think damn you know that was like i i don't want to regret sticking to that and while i'm young and while i've got you know lots of opportunities and while my businesses are going well and the youtube channel is going all right it makes sense to take a step back and actually think what do i actually want to do do i really want to stick with this decision i made at age 16 or do i want to maybe switch to something else so that was one part of it i wasn't really sure if i want to stay in medicine the second part of it was that if i did stay in medicine i really had no idea what specialty i was going to go into when i started working in my second year as a doctor i did obstetrics and gynecology for four months and then because of the pandemic kind of screwed everything up i ended up staying on obstetrics and gynecology for another four months and when i went into it i kind of thought that maybe obstetrics and gynecology was something that i would want to do as a specialty further down the line but then through doing it for eight months i kind of fell out of love with it and i realized that okay i've now tried this for eight months and i don't really see myself becoming an obstetrician and or a gynecologist so at that point i had experience in cardiology elderly care medicine general surgery psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology and i really couldn't see myself doing any of those specialties and one thing that was in my mind is that a specialty that i enjoyed most of all in medical school other than obstetrics and gynecology was emergency medicine like working in the emergency department we call it accident and emergency a e the americans call it er the emergency room but i kind of liked the lifestyle and the idea of working in emergency medicine the problem was i just didn't have any experience at all actually doing it so right now as i'm thinking like what specialty do i want to go to go into if any like a e emergency medicine is at the top of the list but it's like committing myself to a sort of seven year training program in emergency medicine without actually having any experience of emergency medicine and deciding whether i like it is seem this is a completely stupid thing to do and so overall that brings us to why i quit medicine it was because logistically it made sense b i was intending to travel to australia and like do some emergency medicine and started making some inquiries about okay how can i get a job in australia i had some friends who'd done that as well and thirdly i liked the idea of taking a step back really assessing do i really want to do medicine at all maybe i want to travel the world a bit broaden my horizons explore stuff while i have the luxury of not really having any responsibilities not needing to worry about money thanks to this youtube channel and all those factors culminated to get me to this point in august 2020 where i was like cool that's my this is my last day as a doctor and i don't intend to go back until i figured out like what i actually want to do and that brings us to today so here we are it's march 2021 i'm eight months into my unemployment uh away from medicine it's been eight months since i've set foot inside a hospital and weirdly we're still in the middle of a pandemic where things are a little bit weird but recently i decided that i was actually gonna go back into medicine and i decided that there's a few reasons for this essentially when i when i've been thinking about what do i actually want to do with my life one exercise that i found helpful is kind of imagining 25 years from now what do i want my life to look like it's really hard to imagine life 25 years from now but if i think 25 years from now 10 years from now 15 years from now like sort of quite long term and i think what do i want my average week to look like as i imagine this i keep on landing on the idea of still being a doctor but doing it part-time like i love the idea of doing medicine maybe two days a week maybe three days a week depending on how i'm feeling and something that i've mentioned on the channel quite a lot like through through the last eight years of medical school and being a doctor when i become friends with doctors i would always kind of ask them hey if you won the lottery would you still do medicine for fun and half of them say they would leave immediately and do something else and the other half say they would still do medicine but they would do it part time and in my eight years of asking that question there is not a single person i've ever spoken to who has said if i won the lottery i would still continue to do medicine for fun full-time i think that's it's unreasonable to ask anyone to be in that position like most of us if given the choice for anything we would you know however much you enjoy something it's probably not that fun if you do it like five or six days a week and it would be much more fun if you did it three or four days a week for example and so when i think about what i want my life to look like i like the idea like you you know of doing maybe medicine two days a week maybe doing some like medical educational stuff like teaching at a local medical medical school one or two days a week and spending the rest of my time making internet videos maybe writing some books continuing to write on my website doing this sort of internet entrepreneur type thing now when it comes to making decisions about what we want to do with our lives there have been like sort of thousands of studies that have shown this but you don't really really need a study to know that we are really really bad at actually knowing what we want and so right now i'm thinking that hey it would be cool to work in medicine two or three days a week but i've never actually tried working in medicine two or three days a week so i don't i i'll never know if that's really what i want until i try it i've tried working in medicine five or six days a week and i know that that's not what i want and so there's a big part of me that thinks okay if if my vision for the future is to do medicine two or three days a week i should at least test that assumption to see if it's what i really want to do this is something that tim ferriss talks about a lot in the four-hour work week like our default way of living life is to imagine that okay i just need to work really hard and then when i'm 65 i will retire and then when i retire i'll be chilling on a beach and life will be good and what he says is that don't defer your retirement until the age of 65 try taking a few weeks off work and going to a beach and just sitting there and like try living your retired life and see if it actually brings you happiness see if it's what you really want and the way that he phrases obviously is like when you live that kind of life you realize hang on sitting on a beach and sipping cocktails all day is actually not that fun it gets pretty boring after a while but if you worked for 40 years with that vision of like hey one day i'm gonna sit on a beach all day and do absolutely nothing you'd get to that point and you'd be like damn i've wasted the last i've wasted my whole life because this thing that i thought i wanted is not actually what i wanted and now everything is a bit weird and so the moral of the story there and what i really take from this is that when we think we want something we should test that assumption and so part of the reason why i'm going back into medicine right now is because i want to test the assumption that do i enjoy working as a doctor two or three days a week part two of why i want to go back into medicine is because this you know i'm i'm quite a utilitarian guy in the way that i approach like cost benefit analyses and like partly why you know if someone says hey ali don't you feel guilty that you're not working in medicine in the middle of a pandemic the answer to that is no i don't feel guilty at all and the reason i don't feel guilty at all is because objectively my kind of marginal impact on the world is so much higher making these internet videos and being of being a full-time youtuber because it just affects so much so many more people in so many different ways than if i was just another doctor on the front lines just being a doctor like i'm i'm i'm not special as a doctor right i'm just a junior doctor i've been doing it for two years i have very limited experience i think i'm all right i think i have alright communication skills i quite enjoy it but there is really not much that separates me from other doctors which is kind of how medicine is supposed to work it does like medicine is not supposed to rely on individuals standing out and being particularly amazing the system is supposed to be such that you can put anyone who is sufficiently qualified into the system and because of the evidence-based processes and the guidelines and everything like that how you know the system will deliver a good outcome for the patient rather than individuals going above and beyond and delivering a good outcome for the patient and this is how a lot of successful businesses are made as well like mcdonald's is a perfect example yes i'm drawing a comparison between mcdonald's and the healthcare system because the point is it's it's it's really all about the system the nice thing about mcdonald's is that you get exactly the same experience whichever mcdonald's you go to anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world because their system is so tight and so well tuned that you can put basically anyone with a small amount of training and a mcdonald's uniform you can put them into the system and they will deliver a consistent result and that's kind of what medicine should be as well obviously there is an element of like being nice to the patients and like taking care and stuff but really the system is what gives the results rather than individuals and so if we do a utilitarian analysis of like ali being a doctor versus are you not being a doctor only being a doctor is you know i i slot into a an existing well-oiled machine i'm yet another cog in that machine there's really nothing special about me as a doctor i'm just as good or just as bad as any other doctor of my my my experience level and so i contribute very very slightly to being a cog in this like big machine but ultimately it's the machine that gave that gives the patient the results there's also an element of if i'm not the cog in that machine someone else will be the cog in that machine like especially in the hospitals that i am there is occasionally a shortage of doctors but it's not like particularly dramatic it's not so dramatic that one extra doctor working part-time in the system is actually going to make any difference and the way the system is designed it means that gaps do get filled by extra shifts or locums or things things like that so in the ali being a doctor road there is like my marginal impact is like very very very tiny as just being a doctor on the front lines but in the scenario of ali not being a doctor my marginal impact thanks to this youtube channel and the other stuff i do is pretty high because if i wasn't doing these youtube videos it's not like someone else would just take up my place and start doing these youtube videos and i'm not trying to compare the impact of like making silly internet videos with the impact of actually trying to actually saving lives as a doctor but i mean like if it comes down to it it's like people have done analyses that on average in the western world a doctor will save about eight lives throughout the course of their entire career if you go by estimates from the website givewell which is a charity like um sort of analysis platform donating to the against malaria foundation if i were to donate three thousand dollars to the against malaria foundation that would on average save one life and so if i donate 24 000 to the against malaria foundation i'm saving eight lives if i were to be a doctor my whole career i'm saving eight lives so just with that analysis alone if i can make more money off of youtube and because i've taken the giving what we can pledge which is where i give 10 of my income every year to charity i actually save more lives by making money on the internet and giving that money to charity than i do by working full-time as a doctor for the rest of my life that's one aspect of it the other aspect of it is like you know making videos like this it's very hard to um it's hard to quantify the the impact of them but if the messages and emails and stuff is or anything to go by people emailing me you know email me saying that you know thanks thanks to your videos i learned how to study for my exams and now i've gone into med school and you know i wouldn't have done it without this and there's a lot more kind of marginal impact that i have making videos on the internet than i do as a cog in a machine so that is why i've never really felt guilty about not working in a pandemic but having said all of that there is still something qualitatively different about sitting talking to a camera and putting videos on the internet that's fine but like there is something that's much nicer about in-person interaction and this probably doesn't need to be said but i do genuinely enjoy being a doctor and there is something nice about talking to patients and like being able to help people and having banter with the co-workers and that whole real life community vibe of being a doctor even though the impact of me being a doctor is like quite small compared to my impact on the internet there is still something there and so that's kind of reason number two as to why i've been thinking for a while that maybe i want to go back into medicine because i'm not really getting that side of the human experience sitting here on in front of my camera with a light shining in my face making youtube videos and part number three of why i'm going back into medicine is that i don't know i feel like my own creativity so my own like life experience and stuff has been stifled in a way by just sitting in my flat for the last eight months making videos on the internet and being on zoom calls all day partly this is the pandemic to blame and i think if it weren't for the pandemic i would have been traveling around the world i would have been dabbling in medicine maybe in australia maybe new zealand you know i would have done more stuff but especially because of the pandemic i feel like my whole life is getting up being on zoom calls all day making a video being on more zoom calls playing world of warcraft going to sleep and basically repeating this process for the last eight months and there's a huge part of me that things that like i don't want to be a professional influencer like i don't i actually don't want to be a full-time youtuber it's not the life that i imagine for myself and i think there's something more interesting about someone who is actually working as a doctor and using insights from that experience and having that life experience and then making videos about it rather than someone who is sort of the person that i've turned into which is i sit on my ass all day in front of a desk reading stuff and browsing twitter and then i make videos about the stuff that i've read and the twitter that i've browsed like that's just so much less interesting than actually having real first-hand experience of doing stuff whatever that stuff is whether it's being a doctor or a lawyer or traveling the world just doing anything doing something and then talking about it is so much more interesting than reading something and then talking about it and i feel like over the last eight months partly thanks to the pandemic party thanks to this setup that i've got here in my flat i've become the sort of person who reads stuff and then talks about it whereas i know i want to be the person who does stuff and then talks about it and so that's why i want to go back into medicine and in fact in like mid-january i had a chat with one of the emergency medicine consultants at my local hospital and i explained this to him about being i look man i quite like the idea of doing some some shifts in emergency medicine i don't have any experience in it but like you know me and you know i'm reasonably legit can can you give me a sort of part-time job and he was like yeah sure no problem you know i think you're legit happy to you know invite you to do extra shifts in the emergency department if you if that's what you want and so now i'm pretty much just waiting for the paperwork to be sorted um this is actually like surprisingly annoying like even though i've worked at this hospital before and they should have all my paperwork there's still like a large amount of hoops to jump through in terms of filling up forms and right now sort of six weeks later my criminal records check is still being processed by the criminal records people and i can't go back into working as a doctor until i have been cleared that i have no criminal record and for some reason this has just been processing since like the first of february and now it's like middle of march so for the last six weeks this criminal records check is just taking ages to come through and so right now i'm in this position i'm kind of in this limbo where i'm like look i want to go back to work as a doctor i want to do it like two or three days a week maybe even more than that initially to get more experience i want to see if i like it i want to hang out with colleagues i want to get vaccinated i want to sort of help out in the pandemic all this sort of stuff but my criminal record check is is causing some problems so that's kind of the position where i'm at i left medicine thinking i was going to travel the world and explore my horizons and figure out what i want to do i realized that well i can't explore the world and figure out what i want to do and so now i've decided i want to go back into medicine and see how i feel about emergency medicine as a specialty is that the specialty i want to go into in the future who knows do i like the idea of working part-time as a doctor i think i would but i don't know i'm going to test that assumption and so here we are today me sitting here explaining in this video why i left medicine and why i'm going back that's it like i don't really have any moral story here nothing particularly interesting about it um if you like this video you might like to check out this video over here which talks about how i feel like i've wasted the last six months of my life working on my book that's another kind of rambly kind of uh sharing my feelings and stuff type video similar to this one thank you so much for watching have a great evening and i'll see you hopefully in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 449,041

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal

Id: pUmuBfkqBY0

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021