Completing Internal Medicine at Baylor, Texas- MeRIT( medical research investigator) track. |
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VP: Yeah, there’ s a new building for research coming up near the trauma centre. |
SP: What prompted a switch from core clinical to research? Was it a matter of preference or was it something more fundamental?
AA: For me, it was fundamental. Even when I was doing MBBS, I was thinking I want to do research. I deviated only in the sense that if I do medicine and research before I go completely research, then perhaps it is a better way of getting into research. But now when I look back upon it, I am not entirely convinced that this is the only way. Because, for example, I did continue with internal medicine, pulmonary medicine, critical care and many of those things have helped me throughout my life. So what I never have to do is to prove to another clinical specialist that I know something. That helps. And I’ ll tell you that in the situation especially like in India, where people look at your degrees before they meet you and talk with you, it helps a lot. But
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look at the other end. At the time I reached America around‘ 96 or‘ 98, Baylor- Texas, was a center for the Human Genome project. Then, data and medicine, IT and medicine – all these areas got built around that time. So one never knows. The advantage of doing clinical is that you get more of the conventional safe training, which makes you guaranteed employable. The trouble is you may miss some of the cutting edge trends that were just about to start during the time you went the routine way. If you think that you’ re living in a time where medicine is in midst of a major change and that change will be driven by new research and new ideas, that is the worst time to invest in conventional training. If you are in a stable period, you are better off with conventional training. Now what I can say is that when I made these decisions in‘ 95 /’ 96, the world was a very incrementally moving place. You guys live in an exponentially changing world. In our time, if things changed slightly over 5 years, life felt like, oh! it changed! Now every year something changes. So I think I followed |
the right path for my time, did the conventional things also. There was no guarantee of being able to convince somebody that my research adds value. Today I see that there is almost a demand for people who are at interface areas and so on.
In the private sector also. The private sector, while giving you a job, it does not care about whether you have all the right degrees; it looks at the value that you add. The government, in contrast, prioritizes a job, it is the set of qualifications one has. So tomorrow if I want to join the pulmonary disease department of AIIMS, it will say somewhere that a DM in pulmonary disease or equivalent( is required), and I’ ll be fine because I did my equivalent. But somebody who had tremendous interest in lung function testing, went right after his MBBS into Lung function testing and did a little bit of engineering, and is probably a better pulmonary function testing guy than a young doctor, will not be able to apply.
That is how America is different. The head of our sleep lab, was a Ph. D. But officially the rules said that a Ph. D. cannot train a MD. In sleep medicine, he was not the one to sign the certificate. So you would spend all your time with him. He was the guy to whom you would be saying how do we interpret this or that. But when it came time to
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