Without the White Coat
By Florentino P. Alerta II, M.D.

CPU … starting a medical career

With three medical schools in the island of Panay and another in the island of Negros there will be a wide range of choices for parents and their children pursuing a career in the medical field. There is a government run university for those who will have some financial constraints. However, aside from the financial constraint, choosing a medical school will be a tough decision to make. It will always be on the financial side that decisions will be made. (Considering the state of economics of our country that would sure make a big difference), but setting aside the financial aspect or factor what other factors should determine the perfect or right choice for a medical school to prepare your children to be “good” doctors or physicians? The ultimate choice should not depend on the “track record”, but the “product” the medical school will produce. There is a very famous line uttered by a professor in Medicine in a famous medical school in the state of Pennsylvania to incoming first year medical students, “we will make doctors out of you” . With that statement we have made our professors as our mentors in the field of medicine, thus graduates are molded by the teachers or professors they have in medical school, and not through a system that is implemented in medical school. The gradu ates are molded early in medical school on how they will view a medical situation and thus offer an early intervention. None of the four medical school in our region or any other place in the country had ever stated to produce the “first Christian doctors”. Nowhere in the country that a medical curriculum was not only geared or designed to give the medical student a career in the field of medicine, but to produce doctors that “care” … then you had chosen the right medical school after a long consideration and decision, the College of Medicine at Central Philippine University.

As students of medicine we have always viewed our mentors or teachers in medicine as successful practitioners in their field of endeavor of having a new car and a humungous mansion in an exclusive and posh subdivision in the city that had left imprints in our mind to follow their footsteps, but there was one thing that we all forget, in depth of the rewards we tend to forget that “somebody” in the our medical practice the “human being” we call the patient. With the entry of business into the medical practice we tend to forget on how we “care” for the patient. No medical school in the country had ever started to embark in a task so huge that gives the “patient” as the center point of medical care, and not dwell on the disease entity. The students are taught that the patient as a After finishing medical school at CPU, it guarantees that there will be a “CHRISTIAN DOCTOR” distributed in our communities.