Student Physician Speaks

I'm catching up on my reading and I just finished the last edition of the journal Student Physician from the American Medical Student Association (AMSA). The list of challenges in this issue was tremendous. As I read everything I took note...from the ads, letters to the editors, article content, and side bars:

Aging population, soaring costs in healthcare, millions of uninsured and underinsured, staggering nurse shortages, medical professional depression, lack of business savvy teaching in medical school, medical school debt, lack of ability to recruit and retain rural health physicians, undisclosed payments to researchers by drug companies (at Harvard, to the tune of a $million), conflict of interest in research, accepting gifts from pharmaceutical companies and integrity, Medicare payment shortfalls, paperwork increases in the office...

I must be nuts! Why would anybody want to enter this arena of work? How is it possible that I still have the passion to be a physician, elevate my knowledge, serve people in unique ways and focus my career in this way? I think sustaining this momentum is the key. But I would love to pick up a journal dedicated to medical studies or practice and read about the more positive aspects of being a student and the field that I study. Is that really too much to ask? We've heard enough of the problems. How about the solutions? I don't know enough to propose solutions, but hope to be part of them. But I challenge writers of the world of medicine to find solutions oriented topics and disseminate them with the same vim and vigor (I wish I knew what that was) as they do the problems.