Growing up, it wasn’t weird or abnormal for me to be around Medicine. My father was a cardiologist, a great uncle was a pulmonologist and another aunt was an oncologist – distantly, there were a few more relatives out there that had some role in healthcare as physicians or nursing as well. The area I grew up in was fairly populated, in suburbia around Sacramento, the California capitol. I went to private schools, including a Jesuit High School and, as a lot of these programs were intentionally designed to prepare for college, a lot of the kids I met growing up were offspring of physicians. Medicine was everywhere, boringly common and not unique at all. So one night, when I was out at my local country dancing bar in Missouri, I paused when one of the “regulars,” a woman I’d gotten to know over months who happens to be the wife of a pastor in a small town 1-2 hours away, said to me, “You know, I was explaining to my husband that I knew you the other day and he didn’t believe I was friends with a Doctor. I swear, he even looked you up!” “Wow”, I thought, “I’m not that special”.

Throughout medical training, I have become immersed in a realm where everyone I know is a physician. From medical school onwards, the people I hung out with due to close proximity and the same stages of training, were usually physicians. I never really thought much about it, and never did it intentionally, but we always understood each other. We tended to make up the majority of the kind of person in whatever room we were in, which is unsurprising. Even when we took a large group vacation to Cancun my intern year of Residency, there were more doctors than there were other people in our group (significant others, mainly). One particular experience that always sticks out to me was my final year of residency when I presented a case report at a regional conference in New Orleans, my alma mater. At the time, my mentor, an Attending Neonatologist, was also present to support another presentation by an engineering graduate student. Several years younger than even the youngest physicain trainee, I will never forget his white-eyed speculation at walking into the hotel lobby and then the conference room to find himself inundated by physicians. That night, after all of the “work” had been done, we found ourselves wandering down Bourbon Street – a place, that just a few years ago I had been a medical student full of my own vices, and it was a very nostalgic feeling being able to now show a group of full fledged or almost full fledged doctors around. The engineering student, as he saw my mentor in his later 50’s chug a beer and get onto stage to sing karaoke, was bewildered at what he was seeing; and, in the morning, we would all dress back up in our suits and ties and show back up to the conference as if nothing had happened. It has always been a consistency I have found among physicians, to work hard and play hard, right? That night as we boisterously surrounded him at The Sazerac Bar in The Roosevelt hotel, we found ourselves to be humbled by his presence. It was fascinating to talk to an engineering student; he was, after all, the most unique person among us. It’s not often that I meet an engineer at a medical conference. We tried to explain it to him, but he kept repeating, “I’m not that interesting! You are DOCTORS!”

The reality of life is that we all choose a job or profession for one reason or another. Either there is an innate calling, we find an interest that keeps us waking up every morning, or, we simply are finding our own path to keeping food on the table. However, what we find unique or who we find curious, is always relative. It was the most humbling and heartfelt experience to have my close line dancing friend at a small, mainly blue-collar, country bar in a shed somewhere in Missouri, explain to me what it was like telling her husband she knew me. I instantly understood and felt the void, and in that same instant, felt the void start to close and the gap start to disappear. It is so often a misconstrued understanding by physicians and those in healthcare as to the actual reason that many don’t trust western medicine in contemporary times. Sure, there are many providers that are touting inaccurate information, and sure un-evidenced advice in a time period in which people no longer know how to validate the validity of the “research” they do themselves has pervaded social media, the main source of news for an unfortunate majority… However, the bigger question that has grown on my mind, mainly through exposure to multiple communities and cultures throughout the country, is really the question of how many physicians one actually knows, by any number of degrees of separation?

Depending on the source, it’s estimated that 0.31% of the United States Population are Physicians, and per the CDC’s last estimate (done every 10 years), there are likely ~30 physicians per 10,000 people. There is always discussion on the implications of race in the demographics of physicians, and it makes sense: people are much less likely to trust someone that doesn’t look like them or doesn’t come from the same place as them. I encourage you to think beyond race, to think among every facet of socioeconomic factors including rural vs urban living, or viewers of CNN vs FoxNews even. The reality is that most people don’t know a physician firsthand. The reality is that most people likely don’t know a physician even secondhand. If you are surrounded by naysayers and feel a large gap between another and yourself, who are you more likely to believe and listen to? The gap of trust is something that so many of us in medicine feel, but something so many of us don’t take the time to truly understand. I am aware that the color of my skin, my upbringing, my income and my professional social status leads to an alienation from those that are different. I am aware that some in my position are condescending or unconsciously reverberate elitism.

But that night, when the wife of a Pastor from a small town saw me as a Human, as a friend, and as someone not that different from herself, I felt the gap becoming one inch smaller. The best part, something that wasn’t immediately clear to me, is that she felt the same way.

Image Credit: ChatGPT