Honey and turmeric: from a young age, my mother would blend these ingredients into a sticky yellow paste to soothe skin or calm a cough. As Indian immigrants, my parents filled cabinets with colorful spices, ready to flavor cooking or treat common ailments. With a physician for a father, I grew up with a nuanced view of medicine, equally balanced between prescriptions and these cultural home remedies. I listened eagerly to my father’s stories during dinner table conversations, where he excitedly told me about patients he had met of all backgrounds, and how he approached the ailments they presented. I became intrigued by this puzzle-like problem-solving, where physicians would piece together precise scientific knowledge with the unpredictability of human behavior to improve the lives of their patients. With visits to my family in India, however, I observed in some people how different my life could have been with limited access to healthcare. Compelled to act on the benefits I had gained living in the United States, I arrived at Duke determined to better understand first the interplay between culture and health, and then how I could contribute to the integration of the two as a physician.

As I walked down the dirt streets of the rural Costa Rican neighborhood El Tigre a few years later, covered in the grime of bug spray and sweat, I felt closer to this goal. Studying for the semester in Costa Rica, I had the opportunity to combine my academic interests in Biology and Spanish by designing a study with two other students to investigate my curiosity regarding the rising prevalence of tropical diseases, such as zika and dengue, in Central America despite government intervention. As a team, we contacted local clinics and conversed with native speakers on how to make a culturally competent questionnaire in Spanish to gauge a rural community’s perceptions of tropical diseases. As I went door-to-door in the neighborhood, passing children playing by standing water, and sat in living rooms without doors or windows, I recognized that disease was more a product of their social circumstances. Their socioeconomic status, for example, prevented them from buying screens to seal their home from insects. After conversing with 100 participants about home remedies and vernacular for disease, we realized the limited overlap between the community and the government’s conceptualization of disease. I was struck by how contracting diseases kept children from furthering their education and adults from working, perpetuating the mechanism that led to their illness in the first place. As I work to publish our results, it is clear that taking the initiative to communicate with neighborhoods through questionnaires such as ours could lead to better-tailored interventions, and perhaps contribute to breaking this cycle of disease. I felt motivated to become a physician due to how I strongly enjoyed taking the initiative to start this communication that could potentially improve lives.

I found the same cyclical nature of disease while volunteering with the low-income elderly in Durham. After introductory neuroscience courses sparked my interest in diseases of memory, I worked as a summer volunteer with the nonprofit A Helping Hand of Durham. For three months, I worked with seniors with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s who could not afford companion care. Whether in their homes helping with laundry, or leading exercise classes in adult daycares, I could not ignore how many of the seniors’ interactions were defined by the seniors’ diseases. Conversations with family , for example, were often dominated by concerns about the financial strain of prescriptions, providing a real representation of class discussions of the many gaps in Medicare and Medicaid’s long-term care coverage. Through our daily conversations, I learned about each person’s multifaceted personality and rich life history, and was impacted by the optimism many maintained. After learning in classes how common neurodegenerative diseases are, and recognizing how the disease would increase their financial burden, which would in turn worsen their disease, I felt motivated to serve this community. I co-founded the club DukeHAND as co-president to raise awareness, fundraise, and serve this local population. Through growing the club by finding an executive board, organizing educational and fundraising events on campus, and training new volunteers, I have greatly appreciated the power of teamwork in expanding the impact I could have in this population.

From my early interactions with natural Indian remedies to my clinical and research experiences abroad and in Durham, my desire to pursue medicine has grown. I valued most the opportunity to connect with people of all ages, backgrounds, nationalities, and lifestyles. Whether in India, Costa Rica, the United States, or elsewhere, I now believe in the commonality that unites these different types of people: our health is dependent not only on our physical state, but also on the social, emotional, mental and financial circumstances that constitute our life experiences. I feel driven to become a physician because of the opportunity to connect with people on this holistic basis to improve their wellbeing beyond just their health.