Watching a live surgical procedure could scare the squeamish out of practicing medicine. Tulsi Patel’s take on the experience?
“Best birthday present ever.”
Patel, a philosophy major with a concentration in Medicine, Health and Human Values, spent her summer interning at the Mayo Clinic, widely regarded as the “No. 1 hospital in the world.” As a member of the Clemson University Honors College and National Scholars Program, Patel had many reasons to participate in the internship. It was prestigious, competitive and rigorous. But most of all, it was focused on the issue that has motivated her academic career more than any other: medical ethics.
Her study of how ethics impact treatment led to her standing in an operating theater — on her birthday — watching a patient receive a life-saving kidney transplant.
Building Trust
When it comes to organ transplants, ethics is not just a thought experiment. It has life-or-death implications.
“Some of the big questions that come about in transplant ethics are that organs are such scarce resources; there are never enough donated organs for patients in need,” Patel explained.
She learned how transplant selection committees review a plethora of factors to determine whether to accept, defer or deny a patient’s candidacy for an organ transplant. The factors include the patient’s medical history, psychiatric preparedness, financial capacity and the availability of a matching donor. The selection process can be a complex process for patients, clinicians and donors.
“I researched how transplant ethics tackles some hard questions,” she said. “We had to consider things like scarce resource allocation, diminishing trust, and ethical decision-making, and then look at how those considerations can ultimately save lives.”
Developing an ethics-driven selection process builds trust for organ donors; greater trust leads to more organs available for transplant; more available transplants save the lives of more patients. The line from ethical policies to patient outcomes is direct.
Transplants were one area of bioethics that Patel explored at the Mayo Clinic, but far from the only one. She also worked with a principal investigator on policy-driven research in medical interpretation and linguistic justice.
“One of the clinicians who came to speak to us said that you can really squeeze bioethics out of a stone,” she said, and noted that she had the flexibility to build the internship around topics that she was interested in.
Building a career
Patel says that one of her takeaways from the summer was how the work helped draw the line between bioethics — which deals with broad implications across science, health care systems and health policy — and clinical ethics, which guide the day-to-day decisions of clinicians. Both are important to her goals.
While Patel has a passion for the big questions, her professional goal is to become a doctor, specifically practicing family medicine. Her desire to become a doctor arose from her experience growing up with her grandmother, who has struggled with chronic illness and lives with Patel’s family in Greenville.
“I found that directly engaging with someone when they’re going through some of the toughest days of their life is really, really hard. But it’s also incredibly fulfilling, and it creates relationships that you genuinely cannot break,” she said.
After Clemson, Patel plans to pursue first a master’s degree and then attend medical school.
Her choice to study philosophy has her uniquely positioned for success. Admissions data from the AAMC (American Association of Medical Colleges) bears this out: humanities majors were accepted to medical school at nearly 52%, compared to about 42% for biological sciences majors, and outscored them on every section of the MCAT. Clemson’s unique concentration in Medicine, Health and Human Values also gives her a distinctive advantage.
“I look back at my freshman-year self and the way that my writing, my critical thinking, the way that I engage with complex topics has improved,” she said. “The mentors I’ve had, and the opportunities that have opened up for me have been truly amazing through this concentration.”
