Topic > My Research into Medicine

During my freshman year of high school my mother thought I was old enough to know the complications of my birth. She told me about the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, the blood filling my lungs, and how she couldn't hold me right away because she blacked out due to excessive blood loss. The day I realized I wanted to go into medicine was the day I learned about this story. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay I soon became interested in the inner workings of the human body. More specifically, I became interested in the body's immune system and circulatory system. This led me to come up with a project titled “Does Turmeric Improve Spotted Planaria Regeneration?” with my brother. It was an idea based on my grandmother who applied a ginger-like root called turmeric to burns and open wounds claiming it helped speed up the healing process and prevented scarring. When I saw her do it, I became more and more interested. Digging into the project's design, I knew that cutting off the patients' arm and then applying the enhanced root might raise some eyebrows in the ethics community. Instead, we stayed within the lines permitted by the ethics committee and instead mixed turmeric into the water of Planaria maculate, a worm that was capable of regrowing if cut in half. Discovering that turmeric had an effect on regeneration, accelerating the regeneration of Planaria maculata, thrilled me very much. We ended up taking this project to the Canada-Wide Science Fair where we won gold. This win was very motivating for me because now I found something that not only interested me and was passionate about, but that would lead me to a career that I would also enjoy. I quickly discovered that the human body was much more complex than my thirteen-year-old mind could imagine, and this only made me more interested in the anatomy and physiology of the human body. Growing up, there were many times I went to the hospital to visit family and friends who needed emergency care. That was also the last place I saw some of those people. I saw a serious illness in my family at a young age and at that moment I felt helpless. I saw the work of doctors and other healthcare professionals who helped save the lives of some of the most important people in my life. Therefore, I couldn't think of a more valuable, fulfilling, or personally meaningful career for me.