Thread by @WesElyMD

1/🧵 Letter to Young Scientists

Are there professional trends in academia that are robbing scientists of joy & vocational success?

When #scientists burnout, it robs pts of answers to their problems & increasing their suffering.

Let’s discuss…
 
#AcademicTwitter

2/ The goal of science is to determine the truth about question no one knows the answer to…so that we can make things better for others.

I thought I'd share a few thoughts about discernment and the scientific process that I learned while graying 💫
 
#ScienceTwitter

3/ Discovery in medicine, for example, is not a job. It is not work.

It is creating art. It's painting.

And when we are being artistic, most of us enjoy diving all the way in & immersing ourselves without undo distraction.
 
#MedTwitter

4/ We want to experience the full emotional and intellectual benefits of music, painting, cooking, exercise.

The same is true with #science.

5/ There is something immensely beautiful about developing a question, figuring out how best to answer it, pursuing the data, cleaning & analyzing the data, and then allowing ourselves to relish in the moment while we seek to understand & learn.
 
@nataliexdean @EpiEllie

6/ I have found that I cheat myself of the joy of the scientific process by letting social media overly interrupt my thought process while ✍🏻 and by being a slave to emails & other things that stutter my progress & stunt my growth in seeking wholeness.
 
#medicalstudenttwitter

7/ To approach writing as a chore can achieve publication…

BUT it won’t produce a beautifully woven quilt.

It takes uninterrupted chunks of time (days), attention, & personal investment to get in the zone. This allows synthesis of brush strokes in each corner of the canvas.

8/ 📝 Creating “less” of a manuscript than it deserved to be deprives the reader and the patient.

They are presented with somewhat of a “hidden research paper” rather than something they should be joyously plunging into and gloriously digesting.

9/ We, as writers, want our readers to enjoying each section…the abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion and especially the Tables and Figure legends.

All of it must be woven into a cloak that they can wear, enjoy & share with others.

10/ For 3 decades I have found tremendous joy in discovery as a physician scientist. It has been a gift beyond measure to serve others.

In writing hundreds of papers, I have never once been bored or thought the process tedious. Rather, it’s mesmerizing & endlessly stimulating.

11/ Even under the burden of Covid & the chaos of our clinical circumstances, we designed investigations, some of which have already provided life-saving new therapies (baricitinib) as others unfold (cognitive & physical burdens of #LongCovid)

We need YOU, the next generation!

12/ So if you want to be a healer - whether by touch, words, math, imaging, analytics - and you imagine striving to reduce human suffering, then medicine and the path of academic inquiry may be for you.

There’s so much more, but I will stop & wish you well on your journey.🔥

13/ ADDED THOUGHTS…

I shared these final thoughts w our @CIBScenter team this week.

We are here to affect the lives of people we’ll NEVER meet. We do that by learning from the lives of people we DO meet. We may never know our success or failure in these endeavors…

14/ One barometer is how well we reach medical teams and scientists globally through our peer-reviewed publications. And that means, we have to try REALLY hard to write amazing papers. But the paper is only an end-product of the TONS of work that came beforehand…

15/fin
Our #research process starts w a question, study design, then enrollment, conduct, data collection, data cleaning & analysis, etc, THEN writing.  All of you play a key role in these steps…
 
Let’s keep going…there are lives at stake. And YOU are making a difference.