The engineering solution

It's been a little over a week since I completed my 1st semester of an engineering degree. As a physician transitioning into biomedical engineering, people often ask me about the motivation behind my leaving the field of medicine. Well, to start with, I never left the field nor do I intend to. During my MBBS internship, I was taken aback by our inability to cure people of their diseases in so many cases. The pathophysiology of any disease is complex and it's understandable why the disease gets the better of us. However, I was not okay with telling all these people over and over again that we as doctors can't do anything else.

Biomedical engineering appeared to be the most practical way to deal with the situation. The basic tenet of engineering is identifying a problem and finding a solution to it. It took me a while to notice that every major leap in the way we practice medicine happened in tandem with an engineering advancement. We as doctors are more of service providers. At the end of the day, most interventions are not possible without the accompanying engineering tool(s). If you find that hard to believe, just imagine the COVID-19 pandemic without a pulse oximeter or a ventilator.

Coming back to how I never left the field, all that has changed for me is the stage at which I am working. Instead of being at the end point where we physicians provide these services to patients, I am working at a step before. The problems are still the same but the approach is different. This is where the idea of training doctors as engineers comes in handy. Unlike a traditional engineer, we've spent time with the patient and know exactly what the problem is in practice. The solutions we develop are likely to translate into better results in the clinics.

One could argue that this can be dealt with by an engineer and a doctor working together. While it's good theoretically, in reality, a lot of issues can pop up, some as trivial as time management. These issues slow down the process of innovation in a world where time is of the essence. The lack of collaboration is no longer a bottleneck. A biomedical engineer can work on these problems by bringing the best of both worlds together in the most efficient way possible.

An interdisciplinary approach like this is useful not just for engineering related solutions. A physician trained in the basic sciences will have a much better understanding of the diagnostics than a purely clinic based physician. Those trained in administrative sciences will have a better understanding of global healthcare problems. In this day and age, we need more such hybrid doctors to take the lead. Life ahead won't be easy but it's going to be worth it if you know what you're doing and why.