School Of Public Health

Here we are! I've made it to post #2 of the year. Congratulations, Harry, you're 1/6th the way to not failing this goal. Jokes aside, things are actually going pretty well. My new semester is underway, and I've been reflecting on how my brief time at BUSPH has fundamentally changed my perspective.

I entered my graduate program as your typical neurotic pre-med student, anxious to learn everything about being a doctor. I'm not sure I could tell you precisely what public health was at the time. I was fresh out of a biochemistry program where my world was learning the granularities of signaling pathways and protein structure. Entering a public health field was like looking at an entire shoreline of beaches instead of a single piece of sand. I now have to examine systems of health and law, interactions between people, all at the crossroads of socioeconomics, racial constructs, mass communication, and social determinants of public health. My dense and comfortable world of biochemical minutiae had been blown up like the Big Bang to the expanding universe of public health I see today.

In my daily life, I challenge myself to question systems, force myself to think of possible inequities, and assert that I confront my own biases. I think about my future and know I have no other option but to operate at the intersection of medicine and public health, where collaboration and cooperation are essential to making meaningful and lasting change. I strive to define a new role of physicians in the modern era, where we not only treat symptoms, but also ask questions about the origins and causes of the illnesses we are treating. I envision a global framework of public health entities designed to bring health equity to all.

For now, though, I can laugh about the paradoxical nature of a physician that wants to reduce their own necessity by implementing public health practices that prevent people from stepping foot in their office in the first place. That appeals to me, as I seek to find ways to move away from the traditional doctor-patient model and into a more collaborative approach to health and wellbeing.