If you’ve paid attention to the news recently, you might share my concern that mass shootings are becoming a normalized part of American culture. According to data collected by the United Nations, America leads the developed world in firearm homicides.[1] As a college student in Washington, DC, social justice was an inextricable part of my education. I volunteered, protested, and campaigned for issues I felt strongly about. Assuming you weren’t a student in our nation’s capital, let me tell you that these are all pretty typical parts of the DC college experience. In fact, my zeal for progressivism in the arenas of health and wellness contributed to my desire to become a physician. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until two of my friends were murdered within six weeks of each other this summer that I felt compelled to take a closer look at how, as a medical student, I could better integrate my passion for social justice into my education and clinical practice.
As medical students, our education becomes our lifestyle. It’s demanding, consuming, and vigorous. My support system likes to remind me that I’m not Atlas and that I can’t hold the weight of the world on my shoulders. They tell me to keep my nose in a book and stay focused on my studies. It’s difficult for me to comply with these directives when I feel like I’m neglecting the part of myself that is aware of the world beyond medical school. It took this summer’s tragedies to remind me that even as a student doctor, I need to hold myself accountable for working to reduce social injustice, particularly community violence. What I’ve realized is that while my activism efforts may not reflect those I experienced as a college student, I can still make simple adjustments in my current practice to potentiate positive change.
Since this summer, one of the modifications I made, in an effort to merge my medical and activist identities, is to ask my patients to rate their stress on a scale of one to ten when I take their social history. On the surface, this might not seem like a significant exercise. After all, I’ve been asking my patients about their life stressors since I started school last year. What I realized is that while most people can easily spout off a list of things that make them feel strained (bills, student loans, family responsibilities, looming deadlines, etc.), it’s an entirely different exercise to ask patients to evaluate their stress from a holistic perspective. Though this practice correlates stress level to a numerical value, I have found that I can actually get a better qualitative picture of a patient’s mental and emotional wellbeing and self-awareness by using the one-to-ten stress scale. Perhaps by using this scale, we will be able to gain awareness of and provide support for struggling patients before they feel compelled to turn towards violence.
I encourage you to employ the one-to-ten stress scale into your history taking routine in the hope that it can open the door to bigger, more important conversations about wellness and lifestyle with our patients. Please feel free to let me know how the scale works for you. I look forward to spending the rest of my medical career advocating for those who are underserved by the medical community, but for now, I hope that having these conversations can be a first step in helping patients deal with problems before they resort to violence. In the weeks and months that have followed the deaths of my friends, I find myself thinking a lot about the people who committed the violent acts that claimed their lives. I wonder if they had medical professionals in their lives who they felt comfortable talking to, and I wonder what they would have said if we, the medical community, had been listening.
References:
- Global Study on Homicide. (2011). United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. https://www.unodc.org/documents/congress/background-information/Crime_Statistics/Global_Study_on_Homicide_2011.pdf
Featured image:
Brother by Fabrizio Rinaldi