The question tends to surface at dinner tables and in hospital corridors, rarely in print: if you had it to do over, would you? For Heather Orman-Lubell MD, a pediatrician with a son currently in medical school, that question is no longer hypothetical. It is, in some sense, playing out in her own family.
Her answer is unambiguous.
"I would 100 percent make the same choice. I honestly can't imagine not being a pediatrician even if there are things about it that I don't like or days I am exhausted."The exhaustion is real, she acknowledges, and so are the frustrations. But she doesn't lead with those when her son or the students and residents rotating through her office ask what the life is actually like.
What she leads with instead is purpose, and she describes it in specific, unguarded terms.
"It's the hugs from a toddler, the heart to hearts with the teens, helping the new parents or the family with a new diagnosis. That's my why. What other profession can do that?"It's a question she appears to mean literally, not rhetorically. The accumulation of small moments, one family, one child, one difficult conversation, is the argument she keeps returning to.
She is candid about what she filters out. The insurance struggles, the politics, the structural pressures of contemporary practice, those she tends to leave aside unless someone specifically asks. Her reasoning is deliberate: she wants young people entering medicine to understand how training has evolved, and in her experience, much of that evolution has been positive. The version of medicine she shares is not sanitized, but it is curated. She talks about the ups and downs. She talks about how the field has changed. She stops short of making the system's problems the centerpiece of the conversation.
What she does insist on is motivation.
"Pursue your passion,"she says, with one condition attached:
"make sure you're doing it for the right reasons."That caveat carries more weight coming from someone whose own child is now navigating the same path she once chose. Whether the next generation of physicians will find the same sustaining sense of purpose she describes, or whether the structural pressures she keeps off the table will eventually crowd it out, is a question her son, and the residents passing through her office, will have to answer for themselves.
