Mountains Beyond Mountains

My favourite paragraph from Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains. To be honest, I never expect to be working at the ‘HIV Central’ of Malaysia. I always thought that I will be posted to Kuala Lumpur General Hospital. But God has better plans for me. I could not even believe I am saying this, but after 10 month being away from clinical work, I am longing to start again. I enjoyed working at the WHO HQ in Geneva, global public health is still my passion and it will always be, but the field is so vast, and I feel that I need to carve out my own niche, and infectious diseases, the biggest threat to public health, is one of the things I am most interested in. If I look at the public health figures I look up to most, they are physicians first, leaders in public health later: Mahathir Mohammad, John Snow, Paul Farmer, Rudolf Virchow, to name a few. I truly believe that by diagnosing diseases of a person, it will shape your mind and way of thinking to diagnose diseases of society in unfathomable ways. In Rudolf Virchow's words, "Politics is nothing but medicine on a larger scale". So come tomorrow, "ID says treat. Love, ID".