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"I don't think the patients would take you seriously" - What supervisors told Dr Dinesh Palipana.
Studies have found that sitting down during interactions and enhances the patient-doctor relationship. This has been a natural advantage for me - a doctor with a spinal cord injury - a wheelchair user. It's good to focus on the positives, right?
In 2025, it is encouraging to see the number of doctors with disabilities growing in Australia. After all, with one and six Australians experiencing disability, it’s important for the profession to reflect the community that it serves. But, after sustaining paralysis from a car accident in 2010, I learned that it's not so much the physicality that stops someone, but attitudes.
Yet, some attitudes have not shifted as fast as our technology has.
For hundreds of years, the professions have thought the same way, reluctant to shift with the rest of society. For many people with disability, these attitudes stop them from accessing education and pursuing happiness through meaningful employment. For me, too, there were attitudinal barriers to navigate in the early part of my career.
Will you pass the exams? Will you be safe in the hospital using a wheelchair? Have you considered another career? These were some of the thoughts shared with me. When I started back as a medical student, then with a spinal cord injury, even I wondered how the patients would see me. This fear was reflected back to me by some supervisors, one who said, "I don't think the patients would take you seriously".
What has been interesting for me, is that over a career that is approaching nearly ten years now, not one patient has made a fuss about the spinal cord injury, at least not to my face.
Perhaps the attitudes of our society has surpassed those of our institutions and professions.
The patients remind me, through their openness, of why we are here. We’re here to serve them.
Two experiences in my life reinforced the love for medicine. One was having depression as a fledgling law student. The other was having a spinal cord injury as a medical student. Both events highlighted the vulnerability that a patient faces in healthcare. In that vulnerability, though, what's most beautiful about medicine emerged – the humanity.
The science of medicine is progressing constantly. It's cognitive challenge is intellectually rewarding. Still, the best memories that I have is not the rare diagnosis, the effective drug, or a procedure. It’s the human interaction.
As far back Hippocrates, it has been said to cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always.
That comfort matters. In the thick of one night, a patient with a significant disability was brought in by the ambulance for an acute illness. They said, “I am so glad that you rolled into my bedside, because I knew that you would understand”. Even only to realise that moment, it has been a career worthwhile.
One of the most poignant moments as a doctor for me has been a corridor conversation with Dr. Stuart Watkins, an emergency physician who was a senior to me since I was a medical student. That evening, Dr. Watkins said, pointing at my hands and legs, “what matters in medicine is not so much how you use those, but how you use these”, pointing at my heart and head. Dr. Watkins is wise, for Dr. Harvey Cushing, the father of neurosurgery, also said, “I would like to see the day when somebody would be appointed surgeon somewhere who had no hands, for the operative part is the least part of the work.”
Disability or not, I have learned over the years what is most important in a doctor. That is, to note Hippocrates again. "Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity."