Career choice insights, part one - the healer

In the context of the upcoming International Women`s Day on March 8th, the Medical Society where I have been a member for over 8 years surveyed women physicians. Here is a summary of my journey towards that calling which became clearer during my years in high school.

1. Did a woman inspire you to pursue medicine? Why medicine?

Although she was a physicist, not a physician, Marie Curie had a profound impact on me by kindling my thirst for knowledge. When I was about 8, I received a kids' book about the story of her life which I found so inspiring. Nobody else in my family is a physician, but my aunt Marie, who has been very dear and special to me ever since she saw me land into this world, was a nurse. Later on, in high school, as I was discovering an interest in science, a doctor named Marie Bonner gave a presentation about her experience practicing medicine in Africa. That encounter ignited my desire to be a healer and consolidated my calling to care for others and empower them. I felt like medicine was the perfect blend of science and altruism (upon writing about all of this, I see once again the pattern with the name Marie, maybe even a clue, as if all of these women named Marie, echoing my own, only recently reclaimed, equivalent of a middle name, constituted a common thread in my life...). And as a medical student, I went to West Africa and worked with women, pregnant women, women in labor and I cared for their newborn, which made me consider Ob/Gyn as a specialty. I eventually settled for psychiatry because I always wanted to understand the human mind, and I liked the fact that the field was for medicine a convergence point with so many other areas (culture, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, ethics, social justice, advocacy).

2. What advice do you give to young women interested in pursuing medicine?

As you think about your professional path and choice of specialty, try to find where your passions, assets and what the world needs intersect. While wanting to help others is very noble, it can be depleting, and an emphasis should be put on increasing the level of health literacy in the general population and starting at a very young age. There are many preventable health conditions that people would not suffer from would they have received foundational knowledge on healthy living like the countless benefits of a balanced diet, sleep, exercise and meditation. Doctors should therefore seek to widely educate, and women should be encouraged to channel their deep feminine side made of nurturance, attunement, being rather than doing, approach based on joy rather than outcomes, transcendence, intuition, sensitivity, creativity, fertility, flexibility and cooperativeness throughout such a mission. As much as I enjoy practicing medicine and psychiatry, I dream of the day where I will be out of business because there won't be a need for the psychiatric services I currently offer. That will mean I will need to find another point of convergence between my passions and the population needs, because people will have found a way to tap into their deep wisdom and they will have become self-healers.

3. Describe the importance of having women physicians and being in leadership positions.

A recent talk I attended revealed that full-time working women make 84 % of what full-time working men make. This is the case even in medicine, where women are often disproportionately assigned unpaid work such as "emotion work" (comforting others) or undervalued work such as mentoring or low-status committee participation. Therefore, we need to make sure that there is an equitable distribution of duties, and that service work is as valued as research work so that women are no longer penalized in their career path and have equal opportunities, time, support and resources for advancement.

I had no idea about that when I entered medical school in 1996 in Montréal. Maybe because 60% of our class was female. I had a misleading sense of reassurance as I felt grateful and proud to be in a field that seemed to be part of the shift in eliminating the gender gap. Even though this was certainly encouraging at the time, there is still a lot of work to do in this area. After practicing medicine for 23 years (including psychiatry for 18 years), I still believe that women have an important role in medicine. Female physicians and other practitioners have a key role in dismantling patriarchal remnants. They can guide the field so that leaders continue to advocate more for women, especially when gender and other inequalities persist all over the world. I believe our main reason for being human is to realize our full potential on this earth. But the bodies and souls of women and girls are still held hostage in many patriarchal systems worldwide. As healers of the body and of the soul, we should all pledge to be a voice for them and make sure they access not only health services but life opportunities for their own growth and development. And as women doctors, we are in an optimal position to ensure there are no more barriers to the universal human right that health care is. 

Stay tuned for the next blog in which I will explore a slightly different career path (hint: when I was 14, I thought I would study literature or go to drama school).

Charles M. Schulz Museum, Santa Rosa, 2023