Sixteen-year-old Sarah Schubert listened in wonder as an emergency room physician described a particularly bewildering medical case: a young boy with mysterious paralysis creeping up his legs and torso and nearing his lungs.
Baffled doctors were about to put him on a ventilator when a medical intern discovered a tick on the patient's head. After they removed the parasite, the boy almost immediately began to regain the use of his limbs, Sarah recalled.
"It's like a puzzle ... like solving a mystery almost," said the rising junior at the Chattanooga School for Arts and Sciences.
The experience, part of the fourth annual Youth Leadership Forum hosted by the Chattanooga and Hamilton County Medical Society and Medical Foundation of Chattanooga, has made her "much more likely" to consider a career in medicine, she said.
The four-day program, started by Dr. Mark Brzezienski, gives high school juniors and seniors a close look at careers in medicine by shadowing physicians and engaging in roundtable discussions with doctors.
This year the program chose 26 students from more than 70 applicants to shadow clinicians at local hospitals.
Also this year, some former participants in the program pursued an even more in-depth look at the medical world through a three-week doctor-shadowing program called Medical Explorations, which wraps up today.
Both programs are part of the Future Docs program of the UT College of Medicine in Chattanooga and Erlanger hospital, said Dr. Kent Hudson, chief of radiology at Erlanger and founder of the Medical Explorations program.
The 16 Medical Explorations students have shadowed various physicians in fields ranging from surgery to radiology.
A new option this year allows the students to work as research assistants in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the UT College of Medicine in Chattanooga.
"After about two weeks in the clinical environment, you see a change in the group as a whole where they're much more comfortable with being in the medical environment," Dr. Hudson said. "It really is opening their eyes to the different facets of medicine."
Health care reforms that will expand health insurance to 30 million more people will bring a need for more doctors and nurses. Programs such as the Youth Leadership Forum could help to meet that need, said Dr. Brzezienski, a plastic surgeon and past president of the local medical society.
Many of the first Youth Leadership Forum students now are graduating from college, so organizers will soon see if those students opt for medical school, he said.
"We're trying to keep track of all of it and generate some numbers so we can determine how effective it is," he said.
Chattanooga native Amelia Morgan, 19, participated in the Youth Leadership Forum two years ago and the Medical Explorations program last summer.
Now a pre-med student at High Point University in North Carolina, Ms. Morgan said her experience shadowing a hospitalist at Erlanger made a particularly strong impact.
"I could see myself doing something like that. He's always on the move. (Hospitalists) don't really have an office. Literally, his patients are his office," she said.
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