The lost vocation of medicine: from calling to commodity

Yet despite all this, I remain convinced that vocation can be reclaimed. I have seen sparks of it. I have worked alongside nurses whose compassion burned bright even when the system tried to smother it. I have mentored students who still dared to look at patients with wonder, who resisted the temptation to see them as checklists. These moments remind me that the vocation is not dead. It is dormant. And like all dormant things, it can awaken-but only if we fight for it.

Reclaiming medicine as a vocation will not be easy. It means refusing to accept the idea that profit should dictate care. It means confronting administrators when their directives betray patients. It means daring to trust your own judgment, even when the system demands obedience. It means remembering that healing is not found in guidelines alone but in listening, in touching, in caring. It means reviving the joy of medicine, which can never be measured in quarterly reports. Above all, it means refusing to forget why we entered this profession in the first place.

To practice medicine as a vocation in today's world is costly. It may mean losing a job, losing status, even losing friends. But the cost of surrendering vocation is far greater. If we continue down this path of commodification, medicine will not survive as a profession worthy of trust. Patients will turn elsewhere, society will fracture further, and the sacred bond between physician and patient will be broken beyond repair.

The choice before us is stark. Medicine will either be a vocation or it will be nothing. We can remain cogs in a machine that processes patients like widgets and rewards obedience above conscience. Or we can reclaim our calling, rediscover the courage and compassion that defined medicine for centuries, and once again stand with our patients as healers rather than employees. That choice belongs not only to doctors but to patients, students, and society as a whole. Patients must demand more. Students must resist the system's suffocation. Doctors must rediscover the flame that first lit their path.

If we succeed, perhaps one day a new generation will walk into a hospital with the same awe I once felt, aware that they are part of something sacred, aware that medicine is not a commodity but a covenant. That is the vocation of medicine. It is the beating heart of our profession. And it is worth fighting for with everything we have left.