AAP Voices Blog

My father always had this strong premonition that I was supposed to become a physician.  He diligently shared this thought with me from the beginning of our father-daughter existence. Initially, as a young child, I thought it endearing that he would believe in me so much that nothing swayed his resolve in this premonition, no matter what I told him to the contrary.  As a snarky adolescent, I was convinced he was being a typical Pakistani father, ascribing blindly to our culture’s strong and pervasive belief that there is no more noble field to aspire to and nothing else worth spending your time studying.  And as a young adult attending university, I questioned whether his deep-seated belief was a way of living vicariously through his child.  Whatever the reason was, I knew how hard pre-med students dedicated themselves to their science-heavy coursework and felt quite confident that my purpose was something else. As a consequence, I knew I had to sacrifice my father’s American Dream by not pursuing medicine. My Salvadoran mother did not have such tightly bound dreams for her three daughters, except she wished for us to have choice and make an active decision about whether we chose to have a career outside of traditional homemaking.  
 
In college, I delved deeply into my Psychology major and loved every class that centered on human interactions.  In hopes of giving back to my community, I volunteered my Saturdays at a UC Davis School of Medicine clinic that served a predominantly undocumented, Latinx patient population in the greater Sacramento area, named Clinica Tepati.  On one of the first Saturdays I volunteered, a patient arrived to the clinic bright and early to receive medical care.  He was a gardener, and that morning while trying to repair his lawn mower, violently shredded his fingers inside the inner workings of the machine.  Bleeding profusely, but unsure of where he could receive trusted medical care due to his undocumented immigration status, he refused to go directly to the hospital and came to our barebones medical clinic instead. I was stunned that he could potentially bleed to death but the fear of deportation determined his next steps in life-preserving medical care. He trusted us as the only place he could safely ask for help, where our cultural and linguistic concordance provided a powerful safety net within this precarious situation.  I was also profoundly struck by how unjust this felt to me--I already understood that healthcare is a basic human right that should be afforded to all people, regardless of their race, religion, nationality, sexuality or income level.  This was the moment that changed my life’s trajectory.  Witnessing how medicine intersected with tenets of social justice by advocating for the most vulnerable and marginalized communities—communities that looked and sounded like my family—was the most profound, fundamental professional calling that I was unable to resist.  

I have been carefully molded into the physician I am today not only by fellow Latinx students, scholars and teachers but largely by Latinx patients that showed me how much my bicultural and bilingual skills were needed in this profession.  

This moment essentially lit the path and direction of my moral compass, and I have been in pursuit of providing equitable medical care ever since. I could have never signed on for the years of hard work that this career demands had I not been fueled by equal parts outrage and conviction that these situations should never happen to any human being, anywhere.  Since then, I have been carefully molded into the physician I am today not only by fellow Latinx students, scholars and teachers but largely by Latinx patients that showed me how much my bicultural and bilingual skills were needed in this profession.  Because of this, I am a physician who knows where my roots are firmly planted.  I am a proud outpatient pediatrician, sowing daily the seeds that fortify the medical home and provide a safe place for families to access equitable and trusted healthcare.  
 
Since that time as an impressionable undergraduate student, there have been countless patient encounters that prove to me that there is still so much hard work ahead of us.  
 
Consider these statistics: In my home state of California, our population is 40% Latinx,
yet CA Latinx physicians are just 6% of total MDs. Less than 3% are Latina. 
 
In striking comparison, Latinx folks make up 85% of all farm workers, 59% of all construction workers and 53% of all employees in food services, according to the U.S. Census.

Therefore, the upcoming National Latinx Physicians Day on October 1 means many things to me.  It is a joyful recognition of what I know to be definitively true—it’s a gift to live out a cherished dream that I had no idea if I was tenacious enough to achieve when I set out to accomplish it.  Serving my patients and my community’s healthcare needs has proven to be worth the challenging journey. As I near the end of every clinical encounter, I wait for that inevitable split second of gratitude held momentarily between doctor and patient. When the patient sincerely wishes me their offering of a prayer, “que Dios me la bendiga”, my heart pauses in recognition of this holy space and serves as a reminder that I am exactly where I am supposed to be. It turns out, to his sheer delight, that my dad was right all along, and we both now enjoy our respective versions of his American Dream. 
 
Second, this day of recognition reaffirms another responsibility that I remain committed to for the rest of my career’s duration. There are too few of us with cultural and linguistic concordance to care for our increasing Latinx population in the state of California. Who takes care of the community, matters deeply for the quality of the care provided. What I am certain of now, that I didn’t know back then, is that we urgently need Latinx folks to bring their authentic selves—their strengths, cultural background, family history, desafios, retos y persistencia to the field of medicine.

Con todo corazón, Happy National Latinx Physicians Day to us all.