Session 301 BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative care specialist at UCSF. A near-death experience as a teenager left him with a unique perspective on disability and death. BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative care specialist at UCSF. A near-death experience as a teenager left him with a unique perspective on disability and death. Back in 1990, he became a triple amputee after he got into an accident when he was in college. He was climbing aboard a train in the hourly hours and getting shocked with 11,000 volts from the overhead electrical current. He woke up in a hospital seeing his two legs and one arm having been amputated. He then went on to finish his degree and work until finding his path to become a physician and went to UCSF. He is now a palliative care physician at UCSF. He has an amazing TED talk and he has been featured on New York Times. BJ talks about his resolve for how we'd look at dying and death. It's something every premed student should be thinking about as you go through your medical training. [03:45] His Interest in Medicine Navigating healthcare and disability early in life due to his accident, BJ got turned on about the idea of being a doctor. No lifelong dream to become a doctor really, but it was seeing healthcare from a patient's point of view that got him interested. "I've got no lifelong dream of being a doctor, it was really just from seeing healthcare from a patient's point of view that got me interested." BJ talks about how he was bathed with medical issues at a very young age. His mom had polio and post-polio syndrome and was progressively disabled from that. He also draws a picture of this tension between the disabled population and medicine, which he finds ironic. So growing up, he was very much tuned into disability issues but it seemed to be anti-medical on some level. It wasn't until those issues were brought home for him personally when he was in those shoes that she got turned on into the medical issues and the medical system issues underlying all this. That being said, he didn't really think about being a policymaker to have a bigger impact on the system, although he was more interested in this. "My first impulse was to get involved with patient care and work one on one with people and their families. Medicine was a skillset I could learn to be in that position." As an art history student in college, he did premeds after college in postbac programs. So his way in was all coming from a different angle. His first impulse was to get involved with patient care and work one on one with people and their families. Medicine was a skill set he thought he could learn to be in that position with individuals. He points out that even if you love patient care, at some point pretty soon, you're tuned into all the things that make practicing medicine and giving care and receiving care harder than they need to be. So he never saw himself in politics but as time went on, he became interested more in those things. [07:55] Handling the Course Work and Fear of Failing BJ was confident with is academics. But the biggest thing that he came across was death and this really changed his relationship to fear and the fear of failure. And it was at that time coming out of his injury that he had a different confidence. He was not so caught up in comparing himself to others nor was he caught up in any fear of failure. Because for him, he has been through an enormous failure in where his body was coming apart. And to come back from that, the idea of medical school wasn't scary. "The idea that I might fail at it or I might not be good at it had lost its teeth. It wasn't longer such a barrier." Mostly, his experience was from a patient's point of view. He was filling his imagination of what it would be like to be on the other side of the white coat. He did have a little bit of shadowing back in Chicago, where he spent a day with a medical director. He describes this as an extremely impactful experience, both in terms o