Thick and thin

After sharing an article about medical student burnout and misery in Facebook, quite a number of friends wrote to me.

Talk to any of the medical students, and it's hard not to notice that their bumpy path is littered with failures. I like listening to their collection of stories, told in their pain and occasionally joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and, more often, their cry.

I can sit and make sounds of empathy, but I am not able to come up with any good solution. Heart-breaking stories, I whispered.

And all the while I was listening, going over their stories, feeling somewhat connected and nostalgic, until finally, at some point, I remembered the physiology of our human heart, which is capable of remodeling in response to environmental demands and stress. That is what I was being told, at least, during the lectures about mechanisms by which the heart tries its best to reduce the stress on the wall of its pumping chamber, through thick and thin. Against the odds, human heart muscles grow tremendously and re-organise themselves after diverse insults (like high blood pressure or heart attack), instead of being dragged in a downward spiral, all the way to a dark alley.

To describe such compensatory response to injury or demand, cardiologists have coined numerous names including hypertrophy, athlete's heart or effort syndrome. Yet, I love the term "plasticity" the most. To be realistic, we will never be able to get rid of all the insults, but we can train or help ourselves to be more plastic in the face of pressure stress. Whew! If our hearts are capable of growing by at least 100% within just a few days of new stress, can we do something similar?