I am being brainwashed.

I have finished over half of my third year of medical school. I know some things now.  And like the rest of my classmates and thousands of other medical trainees around the world, I am being brainwashed.

Medical school administrators like to refer to this brainwashing as "The Hidden Curriculum."  Dr. Wikipedia (AKA the website, which I have seen many doctors consult) claims that The Hidden Curriculum is a "side effect of education."  While we are being slammed with medical facts and lab values, our supervising doctors and residents are brainwashing us with the culture of medicine.  We are becoming doctors, complete with stereotypical doctor personalities.

When I was on my Family Medicine rotation, I preached the value of primary care. I repeatedly encouraged all of my friends to get appropriate preventive screenings and motivationally interviewed anyone with a cigarette or obesity who crossed my path.  On my OBGYN rotation I tried to convince my little sister to get a particular birth control without listening to what her preferences were, rolling my eyes when she disagreed with me because the one I suggested "was the best."  While rotating in Internal Medicine, I began quoting famous journals and speaking with as much medical jargon that I could feasibly fit into each sentence, even when talking to non-medical family members.  Looking back, I feel like I have been rotating through personalities, changing to blend into each specialty. Looking around, I see the majority of my classmates doing the same.

While I have painted a somewhat negative picture of The Hidden Curriculum, I have also had the opportunity to try on some wonderful doctor-like attributes.  While sitting in on clinical encounters with each physician or resident that we work with, medical students encounter contradictory hidden lessons on how to act like a doctor.  Each doctor is different, but the more we see, the more we are supposedly affected.  But affected how?  I have met terrible people with disgusting doctor personalities, yes, but more often I have met beautiful and compassionate people.  People who want to help other people, people who are curious about the world and how things work, people who strive for excellence no matter how small the task.

Let's be realistic, here.  Like any other field, we can't put all doctors into one giant category.  Sure, each specialty has its stereotype, but I have again and again found that the stereotypes aren't always (at least not completely) true.  I almost welcome The Hidden Curriculum as an opportunity to sort through my options and chose my favorite doctor characteristics that I will carry with me (and leave the bad characteristics behind).  Not to mention an opportunity to sort through the specialties and decide which one fits with my beliefs, my attitudes, my personality.

I think medical students have a choice. We can chose to take on personality traits of the doctors around us and become brainwashed to fit the stereotypes that we see. Or we can chose to tailor The Hidden Curriculum to our own personalities and learn the traits we want to keep, and the traits we want to rotate away from.