By Dr. Shashidhar Tatavarthy, ENT Surgeon & Head of Department, Artemis Hospital, Gurugram
You've just cleared your Class 10 boards. The world is wide open, everyone has an opinion, and somewhere between your parents' expectations and your friends' excitement about IT jobs and entrepreneurship, you're trying to figure out what you actually want to do with your life.
I want to talk to you — not as a professor, not as a recruiter — but as a doctor who has spent decades on the other side of an operating table, quite literally holding someone's airway open at 3 AM, knowing that the life in that room depends entirely on the human being wearing the gloves.
Let me tell you something nobody is saying loudly enough right now: this is the worst time in history to choose a career just because it pays well. And paradoxically, it may be one of the best times ever to choose medicine.
The Ground is Shifting Under "Safe" Careers
When today's graduating batch of software engineers were your age, a computer science degree was the golden ticket. Stable job, six-figure salary, work from anywhere. It seemed unshakeable. Today, major technology companies are laying off thousands of engineers every quarter — not because the economy crashed, but because artificial intelligence is doing in seconds what took teams of people days to accomplish. Entire departments are being restructured around AI tools. Entrepreneurs who built products in months are watching AI replicate their idea overnight.
I am not saying technology is bad. I use it every day. But if you are choosing a career based purely on financial security and current market trends, I urge you to look at what is happening to those very markets before you commit the next decade of your life.
AI Cannot Automate Medicine and surgery
A doctor does not just diagnose. A doctor looks at a frightened parent holding a child who cannot breathe, processes a thousand variables in real time, decides, cuts, communicates, and takes moral responsibility for the outcome. That combination of clinical judgment, emotional intelligence, tactile skill, and ethical accountability is extraordinarily difficult to replicate. Physicians and Surgeons operate under stakes so high that every nation in the world has strict regulatory barriers around who can practice it. AI can assist — and does. But AI replacing a surgeon? We are far, far from that world, if we ever get there at all.
Medicine remains irreversibly human.
The Honest Part Nobody Tells You
I will not lie to you. The road is long. MBBS takes five and a half years. A post-graduation adds another three. If you want a super-specialty, add two more. You will be in your early thirties before you are truly independent. Many brilliant students look at this timeline and choose otherwise. I understand.
But consider the alternative: choosing a career that feels fast, then watching it evaporate just as you hit your peak productive years.
India produces over 90,000 MBBS graduates every year. On paper, that sounds magnificent. In practice, we have a doctor-to-patient ratio that would make a statistician weep quietly into their spreadsheet.
What Sustains You When It Gets Hard
I want to recommend a book — not a textbook, but something more valuable. Breathless by Dr. Tali Lando is the kind of book that should be required reading before you choose medicine, and required re-reading every few years after you enter it. Dr. Lando writes as a surgeon who has lived the impossible days — the 3 AM emergencies, the weight of outcomes, the quiet victories that nobody outside an operating room will ever fully understand. She writes with the precision of a clinician and the honesty of someone who has earned the right to speak plainly about this life.For you, as a young person standing at the beginning of your journey, this book will show you what medicine actually looks like from the inside — not sanitised, not glamorised, but real and ultimately, deeply worthwhile. Pick it up. Read it before you decide.
A Personal Note
Every morning I walk into a room where a child is struggling to breathe, a parent is terrified, and the only thing standing between panic and resolution is training, calm, and the decision I make in that moment. Nothing in my life — no promotion, no salary hike, no award — comes close to walking out of that room knowing the child is saved and breathing normally.
If you are talented, driven, and genuinely want to make this world better — not just richer — medicine is waiting for you. Dream it. Pursue it. The world will always need healers.
"To do what nobody else will do, in a way that nobody else can do, in spite of all we go through — that is to be a doctor."— Dr. Martin H. Fischer
Medicine does not need more doctors. It needs more people who cannot sleep at night until they figure out how to help. Those are the doctors the rest of us are waiting for.
Dr. Shashidhar Tatavarthy is an ENT Surgeon and Head of Department at Artemis Hospital, Gurugram, and co-founder of VoxmedAI Healthtech. He can be reached at tbshashi@gmail.com