Choosing Between A Career in Medicine or Research? Why Not Have Both?

Can't decide? Don't!

Student Edge members can submit articles, reviews and opinion pieces inspired by events affecting student life. This opinion piece comes from member Leila Li. Submit your stories here (or contact us directly).

For those of us studying biomedical science or science with a human biology major at university, we often perceive our career pathway to be either medicine or research.

However, the thought has never crossed my mind that someone could devote essentially a decade of their lives to medical training and still pursue a PhD (basically, the highest degree you can get that qualifies you as a medical researcher).

To me, this sounds like absolute struggle-town, especially when I’ve only heard the words ‘PhD’ used in the same sentence as ‘stressful’. Not to mention: How on Earth do I even get into medical school to begin with?

As a young and naïve undergraduate student—who still misses the high school glory days where we had no important life decisions to make—I recently attended the 2018 Victorian Clinical Science Symposium, where I gained some valuable inspiration and insight into the lives of clinician scientists.

But what is a clinician scientist? And why does this matter if you’re not a biology nerd anyway?

From what I can grasp, a clinician scientist plays an extremely vital role at the interface of clinical medicine and science. This unique combination allows doctors to work with patients and use their clinical expertise to answer fundamental scientific questions. Using this research to better understand disease or treatment, clinical scientists can translate these results back to improving patient care.

Undoubtedly, this career has the potential to change millions of lives, medical practice and healthcare systems globally via the best available evidence. Professor Fiona Wood is one living example of how a single clinical scientist can bring about this change.

As a burns surgeon and researcher for more than 20 years, Professor Wood’s greatest contribution is her co-invention of ‘spray-on skin’. This innovative technology first gained fame in 2002 as treatment for victims of the Bali bombings. For patients with severe burns, where their outer layers of skin are damaged, closing these wounds quickly is paramount to reduce risks of serious infections. Although skin grafting is a fast and robust method, a lot of skin is required, and this is not feasible for patients with burns to more than 40 – 50 per cent of their bodies. Skin from another donor is also problematic due to the high risk of rejection by the patient’s own immune system. Even with artificially grown skin from the patient’s own cells, this would take weeks to grow. In contrast, spray-on skin uses small amounts of healthy skin from the patient and artificially grown skin, and heals within days.

Professor Wood’s vision and determination to develop ways to improve her practice in surgery is admirable and earned her the title of Australian of the Year in 2005. Yet, perhaps one of the biggest lessons I learnt from Professor Wood at the conference was to be resilient and that "there is no substitute for hard-work".

So, for those of us struggling to make a career decision, it will be a challenging and life-long journey, but these clinician scientists show us precisely just how you can get the best of both worlds.

Congratulations to Leila for winning this writing challenge. Leila wins a $50 Westfield gift card for her submission. For your chance to win, check out our latest writing challenges in our Competitions section. Also, be sure to follow this guide on how to win the writing challenge.

Header Image: iStock.com/Likoper