Core Concepts
In this article, you will explore a variety of careers at the nexus of chemistry, public health, and medical research. You will learn how the public health field leverages chemistry skill sets to enhance and protect human health, and how chemical perspectives influence public health.
This is the fourth article in a special ChemTalk mini-series about the intersections between chemistry and public health, using COVID-19 as a case study. Across this series, you can expect to learn about the drug discovery and development processes, chemistry’s central role in diagnosing and preventing diseases, and careers that are on the front line of chemistry and public health.
Previous Articles in This Mini-Series
> The Chemistry Behind Coronaviruses
> The Drug Discovery Process
> The Drug Development Process
How do chemistry and public health interact?
When you imagine chemistry careers, you probably picture lab scientists surrounded by bubbling beakers and tinkering with test tubes. And sometimes that’s accurate — but chemistry doesn’t just happen in a lab. It happens in all sorts of settings, including pharmaceutical companies, health care facilities, and out in the field.
The common thread that unites all of these jobs is that chemistry is quite a pragmatic industry. It often features practical work and hands-on learning, whether this manifests as lab experiments or public outreach or STEM education. These characteristics align closely with the public health field’s action-based mission, and when both of these fields overlap, the sum of their work is even greater. Public health lends its broad, human-oriented lens to chemistry work, while chemistry gives the public health field an understanding of disease on the smallest, most detailed scales possible. This dual perspective guides both industries as they unite to improve people’s health.
Of course, not all chemistry jobs are relevant to areas like medicine or health. But for those that are, chemistry careers in the public health field take a lot of different forms. Whether it’s medicine-making or mystery-solving or good, old-fashioned lab experiments, there’s something for everyone. Thanks to chemistry’s role in public health, we have avenues for groundbreaking research and life-saving therapeutics that give patients hope. Let’s look at some of these jobs in more depth. Along the way, we’ll see how the public health field gives chemistry the priceless opportunity to make a human impact.
A World of Opportunity: Chemistry Careers in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Now that we’ve witnessed the drug discovery and development processes from start to finish, let’s remember how far we’ve come. Along the way, we encountered a vast team of people who carried this drug from idea to reality. All this work for the most important person of all: the patient who ultimately receives the drug treatment.
The pharmaceutical industry, which propels drug development forward, is a special domain where the fields of chemistry and public health converge. Working separately, chemists could create drug candidates, and public health professionals could reach people in need. But by combining their expertise, these experts can all deliver safe, effective, functional treatments to patients who benefit from them. In this section, we’ll highlight some of these extraordinary career paths that use chemistry to strengthen public health.
Transforming a Dream into a Drug: Medicinal Chemists
A good idea for a new drug can come from anywhere. But no matter who coins the idea, eventually it crosses the desk (or, lab workbench) of a medicinal chemist.
Medicinal chemists (or pharmaceutical chemists) are the chemical experts who bring medicines to life. Their work is most prominent early on in drug discovery, when they guide the design of the drug. As researchers learn more about the drug candidate’s performance later on, it may become necessary to adjust its chemical structure to make it behave differently. When this happens, medicinal chemists once again lend their expertise in order to improve the candidate’s quality and function.
As preclinical and clinical studies reveal new information about how the drug works, medicinal chemists can course-correct it as needed. They might step in to prevent off-target interactions, minimize unpleasant side effects, or manipulate the ways the drug molecule interacts with the body. Even small changes like modifying the molecule’s functional groups and structure can go a long way in optimizing the drug.
A Look Inside the Lab: Types of Medicinal Chemists
Drug discovery, design, and development is a big undertaking. So big, in fact, that the idea of “medicinal chemistry” actually includes experts from many different scientific disciplines. These experts pitch in by contributing their knowledge, experience, and perspectives to the drug’s final form.
It All Starts with a Plan
Before you can begin to make a drug, you need to determine how that drug would work. A general idea of the drug’s mechanism is enough at this stage; finer details will be determined later on in the process. What will the drug do to the body on a cellular, organ-, or systemic level? How will it act on the disease-causing agent, and how will this behavior change the course of this specific disease? First you need a foundational understanding of biochemistry, the study of how chemical processes occur in living systems. This will teach you two very necessary points: how the body’s chemical processes work when healthy, and how this biochemistry changes when that particular disease comes into play.
However, once you’ve learned enough about the disease’s pathology, you can’t stop there. You also have to think of ways to overcome this dysfunctional biochemistry in patients who have that disease. How can you use a drug to restore the body’s normal chemical processes? Can your drug permanently reverse the symptoms altogether, or only alleviate them by providing short-term relief? Chemical biologists take the lead by answering questions like these. A chemical biologist uses chemistry to understand biological processes. By applying their extensive chemistry knowledge, chemical biologists have the opportunity to manipulate, and hopefully improve, biological systems. Biochemists do vital work by studying the chemistry of the molecules involved in those biological processes, like proteins and DNA. In general, chemical biologists usually have a broader view of a particular process and examine problems on longer length scales – how the expression of different combinations of genes may affect other processes, whereas biochemists operate on a much shorter length scale – what amino acids are responsible for a particular protein-protein interaction, for example.
The specific chemistry concepts involved will vary depending on the drug’s purpose and mechanism. Some examples of techniques that might be utilized are peptide synthesis (these peptides can then influence a protein’s function), protein engineering (whereby chemical biologists create proteins from scratch that have a desirable function or structure), and click chemistry (which promotes fast, selective chemical reactions). Incorporating these strategies might require additional input from experts like organic chemists, theoretical chemists, and physical chemists. A chemical biologist’s work is central to the drug’s design, and therefore its success. After all, if a drug doesn’t succeed in treating a disease, what value does it pose to patients?
Making Something from Nothing through Chemical Synthesis
By now, the chemical biologist has devised a basic game plan. They know the major molecules that are involved in the disease, how they interact with one another to change the body’s chemical process, and how introducing a drug can correct that. But how do we bring that drug into existence?
Drugs are made from other, preexisting molecules. In some ways, being a medicinal chemist is like being a medieval alchemist, toying with small substances to create a wondrous end product. As a synthetic chemist, you’ll use your expansive knowledge of organic chemistry, pharmacology, and physiology to build drugs with a desired outcome. Some treatments can be repurposed from existing medicines, but oftentimes a new drug candidate must be synthesized anew. In chemistry, synthesis means creating a new chemical molecule from one or more precursor molecules through chemical reactions.
The reactions a molecule can undergo depends on its unique chemical properties and its environment. Inspired by the mission of curing a specific disease, a synthetic chemist can maneuver these reactions in order to create a drug capable of treating it. Perhaps the drug molecule needs a particular functional group that will react with another molecule inside the body as soon as they encounter each other. Through synthesis, you can make a drug whose chemical structure has that functional group easily accessible. Maybe there’s no known molecule in nature that boasts all of the chemical properties your drug will need. In those cases, you may be able to use chemical reactions to stitch together desirable parts of precursor molecules. The resulting product — a Franken-molecule of sorts — might just be the world’s next life-changing drug.
Although drug development is a noble pursuit, we must remember that it’s also a business. Once a synthetic chemist has decided the reaction sequence that will best produce the desired drug, the medicinal chemistry team also considers ways to make it more efficient. Efficient syntheses use as few starting materials and precursor molecules as possible, because this minimizes the financial cost of drug production. They also use rapid reactions where they can, in order to cut down on the time required to produce the drug. (This also reduces the amount of time patients have to wait for it.) If the chemical reactions yield multiple products or unwanted byproducts, the team evaluates ways to reduce them while increasing the yield of the desired drug.
Synthetic chemistry is a broader field that can include medicinal chemists. The difference is that synthetic chemists can work in many industries, making endless chemistry-based products: manufacturing, food science, and consumer healthcare, for example. Medicinal chemists specifically work in the pharmaceutical industry, where they make medications as part of the diverse team of scientific experts described in this section.
Who Holds the Deed to the Intellectual Property?
Since the pharmaceutical industry is a business, let’s take on a business perspective for a moment. One key way to increase your own business’s success is to reduce competition from businesses with a similar purpose as yours. The pharmaceutical industry is no exception.
Sometimes, multiple pharmaceutical companies are designing similar drugs at the same time. This is an especially common scenario when the disease is an urgent one, or when health trends bring public attention to the disease. The similar drugs may treat the same disease, use the same mechanism of action, or feature the same active ingredient. Even so, each company’s drug will get manufactured and marketed under a unique brand name.
Although this means that patients have more treatment options to choose from, it represents business competition for each pharmaceutical company involved. To offset the competition, a company might apply for a drug patent. A patent gives an entity the legal right to prevent competitors from profiting from that entity’s invention. In a drug development context, if Pharmaceutical Company A obtains a drug patent, it can prevent Competitor Companies B and C from profiting from drugs that resemble A’s patented drug.
Not just any drug can receive a patent, however. In the U.S., the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) only awards patents to drugs that are functional, novel, and not an obvious solution. When applying for a patent, pharmaceutical companies must prove that their drug is innovative compared to existing drug treatments and works as intended. This motivates the companies to pursue original, creative drug treatments. For example, a company can certainly design drugs that use known mechanisms or use existing medications for inspiration, but those drugs wouldn’t be patentable because they aren’t novel.
A drug that earns a patent is demonstrated to have exceptional promise and utility — factors that attract financial investors to that pharmaceutical company. It boosts the reputation of the patent-holding company and guarantees that they, exclusively, will profit from the drug for a period of time. Drug patenting appeals to pharmaceutical companies because, if they apply for and receive a drug patent, they’ll have more control over another tiny slice of the pharmaceutical industry’s pie.
But that monopoly doesn’t last forever. Most U.S. drug patents are valid for 20 years before they expire. During this period, competitors can manufacture the patented drug only if the patent-holding company grants them permission to. If competitors manufacture or sell their own brands without permission, the patent-holder can take legal action to stop them. After the patent expires, competitors are free to produce the drug even without the patent-holder’s permission. You might see generic versions of the drug join the market, all of which will likely drop in price. By then, at least 20 years have passed since the patented drug was invented, and the standards of what’s considered “novel” or “patentable” have likely risen.
At the patent-holding company, a large team of people contributed to the patented drug’s design, discovery, and development. So who gets to be on the patent, credited as the inventor? The PTO has precise definitions of who counts as an inventor on a U.S. patent. Drug inventors must be individuals, acting independently or as part of a group, and each inventor must meaningfully contribute to the drug’s conception. In other words, everyone else who helped the drug along — the folks who mixed the chemicals, who administered the drug to clinical trial participants, and so forth — aren’t entitled to be listed on the patent.
That doesn’t mean that their efforts weren’t valuable. Everyone involved in the lengthy, complicated drug development process has a role in bettering patients’ lives. Not all medications receive patents anyway; that doesn’t make those medications useless. If you enjoy the thrill of solving a head-scratching synthesis puzzle, if you want your ideas to directly shape future medical treatments, and if you want to proudly stroll down those pharmacy aisles knowing that you conceived of those medications, then medicinal chemistry may be the right career path for you.
Joining Forces: Laboratory Research Scientists
Adjacent to medicinal chemists are research scientists, professionals in the art of exploration. From the start, when a new scientific pursuit emerges as a research question, research scientists are already involved. These individuals devise those questions, design studies to answer them, test theories, analyze data, and draw conclusions from their findings.
To an extent, medicinal chemists are a subcategory within the larger research scientist umbrella. Under this umbrella, there are countless niches where chemistry intersects with health-focused laboratory roles. For example, as a biochemist, you’d have a firsthand look at how chemical mechanisms affect people and other living organisms. Or you could become a histotechnologist, using chemistry techniques to prepare patients’ tissue samples for up-close examination that leads to precise diagnoses and, eventually, the best treatment plan. If you prefer a more supportive role, you could keep these laboratories running smoothly as a laboratory technician, performing background tasks like routine assays or, during preclinical research, animal husbandry. These are only a few of the many, many lab research jobs that integrate chemistry and public health.
What stands out about the laboratory research realm is that it’s highly interdisciplinary. You can find research scientists in just about any field, because new innovations are being crafted all the time. However, we have laboratory research scientists to thank for new advancements in modern medicine: everything from the invention of imaging techniques that let us see what’s wrong in our bodies, to the medications that we rely upon for relief. All of these advancements began as a problem or a limitation for patients. Laboratory research scientists determine ways to overcome those problems so people can live their healthiest lives.
Because lab research is so interdisciplinary, it’s also inherently collaborative. It’s not uncommon for research scientists from different specialties to combine their professional talents to fine-tune a research pursuit. This intellectual collaboration enables scientists to contribute knowledge from various fields, creating a more comprehensive understanding of whatever they’re studying. Whether researching a pharmaceutical drug, a perplexing disease, or a game-changing medical technology, incorporating diverse perspectives into the study can be an immense advantage. You never know — an expert from a completely unrelated field might just offer a key tidbit of information that makes your study even better.
Purpose is built into a lab research scientist’s job, since discovery and analysis lie at the core of it. And with so many options to consider, you’re sure to find a meaningful career anywhere science and medicine intersect.
Testing the Waters: Clinical Researchers
Just as chemistry isn’t limited to a lab environment, neither is research. When it comes to the pharmaceutical industry, eventually research has to happen in real people. If you want to work with cutting-edge scientific research and the patients who count on it, clinical research incorporates both.
Clinical research is the stage of drug development that tests a new drug treatment in humans for the first time. To confirm that the treatment is safe and effective, clinical research personnel monitor this stage and collect data. The goal is to identify ways to minimize health risks and improve the treatment as much as possible before it reaches the public.
A highly structured process, clinical research has to meet a series of milestones and markers of success, so these researchers must comply with regulatory agencies throughout a clinical study. Proficient clinical researchers have an analytical eye, a knack for interpersonal skills, and great attention to detail.
Such a vast process wouldn’t work without the function of many different roles. Clinical research associates (CRAs) oversee the management of a clinical trial. They manage study timelines, review data for accuracy and compliance, and perform site visits to observe the trial’s progress. CRAs have minimal contact with patient study participants, but if that’s an aspect of your dream job you can’t do without, you might thrive as a clinical research coordinator instead. Clinical research coordinators (CRCs) ensure that trials successfully get off the ground and run smoothly afterward. This involves recruiting and screening patients to participate in the study, answering their questions, and scheduling appointments. Meanwhile, CRCs still support the research itself by maintaining regulatory documentation and tracking any adverse reactions that participants may have. Together, CRAs and CRCs keep clinical trials moving forward while adhering closely to ethical guidelines.
Regulatory Standards in Clinical Research
There’s a lot of unseen work that goes into making a clinical trial safe, ethical, and successful. Regulatory standards, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Good Clinical Practice (GCP) and the European Union’s Clinical Trial Regulations, spell out how studies can achieve this. By meeting these standards, the study proves that its data integrity is intact and that it’s not compromising participants’ safety.
A key component of any clinical research trial is informed consent. Informed consent is an ethical requirement that outlines the study’s purpose and the expectations, potential benefits, and potential risks that participants may face during the study. Participants always have opportunities to ask questions and the right to withdraw from the study, even after committing to participate. Informed consent educates patients about how clinical trials could help their medical condition and preserves participants’ autonomy throughout the study.
Informed consent is an example of a regulatory rule in action. On a global level, regulatory guidelines can vary slightly based on the quirks of each country’s medical system. However, they all share a universal goal: confirming that treatments are safe, effective, and were made in an ethical way.
Every regulatory guideline is backed by experts who devise it, improve upon it as needed, and enforce it. Regulatory affairs is the field that assesses medical treatments, pharmaceutical drugs, and medical devices for quality and safety standards. With regulatory specialists‘ support, we can be certain that the treatments we put in our bodies do what they claim they do and were produced legally. In doing so, regulatory specialists protect individual patients’ safety and protect public health on a wider scale.
Another sector of regulatory affairs utilizes regulatory inspectors, who perform audits onsite at institutions like pharmaceutical companies and research facilities. During an audit, the inspector observes the institution’s day-to-day operation. They note how compliant these operations are and flag any concerns that arise. Regulatory inspectors have a reputation for being merciless, unforgiving informants, but whistleblowing wrongdoings isn’t their job’s only purpose. They also have a central role in quality improvement, helping institutions’ regulatory compliance become the best it can be.
Clinical research is the bridge between the inner workings of the pharmaceutical industry and its impact on real-world people. This field entails a wide assortment of professionals who conduct patient outreach, human studies, data collection and evaluation, and more. A single purpose unites all of these unique roles: to safeguard patients’ well-being. If you have a passion for protecting people and want to personally shape future treatments, consider a clinical research career.
Delivering Solutions that Matter: Chemistry Careers in Patient Contexts
We’ve already witnessed how chemistry lays the foundation for drug design and clinical research, giving rise to medicines when they’re needed most. But it also has a crucial role in bringing those medicines to patients who need them, and investigating how those medicines impact the body. Since it underlies everything about how our bodies function, chemistry provides valuable insight to human health. In this section, we’ll see how chemistry directly serves people so they can benefit from its molecular magic.
Behind-the-Scenes Mystery-Solving: Medical Lab Scientists
If you’ve ever had blood drawn at your doctor’s orders, you know that your samples are headed “to the lab,” but you’re not told much else. What on earth happens in between your sample collection and the receipt of your test results? They’re in the trusty hands of a medical lab scientist!
Medical lab scientists (MLSs) analyze patients’ bodily samples and fluid specimens through specific tests that a health care practitioner (HCP) instructs them to perform. After the MLS reports test results to the HCP, the HCP has a better understanding of the patient’s physical state. As such, MLSs are vital to facilitating disease diagnosis.
Here, we must distinguish between diagnostic testing and making a diagnosis. The main functions of an MLS are to perform diagnostic testing (one or more laboratory tests whose results help conclude whether or not a patient has a medical condition) and to share the test results with the HCP. By providing the results, the MLS is not concluding whether or not the patient has a specific condition. The HCP is the one who integrates all of the test results, along with their knowledge of the patient’s symptoms and medical history, to construct and deliver a formal diagnosis to the patient. Armed with the test results, the HCP makes an informed diagnosis and works with the patient to plan their treatment.
MLSs collaborate with HCPs in hospitals, clinics, and other medical settings where patients are awaiting test results. These medical sleuths use masterful biochemistry techniques and sophisticated lab equipment to gather test results. With new lab technologies being invented all the time, medical lab science careers hold exciting change and lots of promise. But that also comes with a lot of responsibility. In this job, it’s particularly important for lab data reporting to be accurate and reliable. If a diagnostic test was performed incorrectly, then the HCP might make a wrong diagnosis, which could have severe repercussions for the patient.
Other Applications of Medical Lab Science
What if the idea of analyzing human samples fascinates you, but you find an MLS’s routine job duties monotonous? Luckily, similar careers exist that may provide a compromise.
To truly reinforce medical lab science’s “mystery-solving” mission, you could add an extra layer of investigation to your work. Forensic scientists don’t just analyze human samples — they analyze criminal evidence. This includes DNA-containing fluid specimens, but also more obscure pieces of crime scene evidence, like fibers, fingerprints, and gunpowder. In this way, forensic science extends beyond public health to involve public safety, too. Forensic chemists, specifically, depend on lab assays to characterize these materials. Just as an MLS’s test results help an HCP make an informed diagnosis, a forensic scientist’s test results help law enforcement pinpoint the perpetrator. Therefore, this is another career that emphasizes the need for accurate, reliable data reporting. An incorrect test result could mistakenly incriminate an innocent person, or let the real perpetrator get away with the crime.
For a job with slightly lower stakes, look no further than toxicology. Like MLSs, toxicologists perform lab tests, but they’re looking for signs of poisoning and other adverse effects. Toxicologists analyze a substance — everything from hazardous chemicals to household cosmetics — to calculate the risk it poses to human, animal, or environmental health. This means that toxicologists’ findings help guide public health policy decisions. By recognizing a substance’s hazards, public health and regulatory officials can take steps to limit the public’s exposure to it. When analyzing dangerous substances, toxicologists consider factors like dosage level, frequency of exposure, the severity of adverse effects, and genetic differences that may influence how sick someone gets. Drawing conclusions from these factors sets safety guidelines on a population-wide scale, so the public can understand and mitigate the risks they face.
Medical lab science is like interpreting a snapshot in time: a biometric sample, a remnant of a crime scene, or a picture of a community’s health. Meticulously compiling data like these ultimately drives public health, environmental health, and even the criminal justice system forward. As we’ve seen in this section, a medical lab science skillset is transferable to multiple contexts, so there are various ways for you to engage with these principles. Let’s look at another application of them: one with a worldwide impact.
Understanding Our World: Environmental Health Experts
We just learned that toxicologists study how substances affect people’s health. Let’s say a toxicology career appeals to you, but you’d rather work in the field than inside of a lab. That’s okay! Let’s briefly zoom in on public health instead. There is a multitude of public health career directions: patient education, health care administration, and epidemiology, to name a few. One such focus area is quite reminiscent of toxicology: environmental health, the study of how people’s environment affects their health.
It’s easy to forget the fact that our environment has such a prominent impact on how we live. Maybe your bustling city offers abundant nightlife activities, but its severe air pollution means you can’t see the stars at night. Or maybe you just moved into your dream apartment — only to discover that it has a mold problem. Environmental health problems may surface from the natural environment (such as natural disasters and climate fluctuations) or from the manmade environment (pollution, agriculture, sanitation, etc.). This field even deals with micro-environments, like how your daily work environment influences your health (ergonomics).
Many of these problems require the intervention of chemistry. Chemistry offers the environmental health field a quantitative analysis of qualitative health issues. Using chemistry, environmental health experts can trace the source of a river’s pollution, establish appropriate exposure limits to hazardous substances in a workplace, and determine how soil contamination affects the food supply. We all need to use water, stay safe at work, and consume food, so chemistry illuminates the connections between our environment and our health.
Why does where you live matter?
One key aspect of environmental health is that different environments present unique health risks. For example, that bustling city might also have noise pollution, interfering with your sleep routine, elevating your stress levels, and eventually damaging your hearing. That apartment whose lease you so eagerly signed might also contain lead paint, raising your risk of lead poisoning and all of its long-term consequences. Due to the air pollution and the mold, both environments could lead you to develop asthma (or could exacerbate asthma, if you already have it).
Around the world, climates and manmade infrastructure vary as well. For instance, problems like hurricanes and rising sea levels have a more detrimental effect on coastal cities than inland ones. Some countries’ sanitation infrastructure is underdeveloped or not widely implemented, so communicable diseases spread more easily within a community. Depending on the circumstances, environmental health issues may appear in the short-term, or not until long after you’ve moved away. For example, perhaps a former Pripyat resident safely evacuated the now-uninhabitable city in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, but has since developed cancer from radiation exposure.
As concerns grow about sustainability and the prospect of climate change, environmental health is becoming increasingly relevant. Environmental health manifests in how people use their environment, interact with it, and try to overcome its challenges. Chemistry has the power to demystify the relationship between people and where they live, informing future public health directions. So the next time you’re planning to move, consider more than just school districts and the cost of living. Consider its potential impact on your health, too. Then, consider what you could do as an environmental health professional to make your town a safer, healthier place for everyone.
Directly Supporting Patients: Health Care Practitioners
Earlier, we mentioned how MLSs work with health care practitioners to streamline the diagnosis process. However, HCPs are responsible for much more than diagnosing patients. They oversee many aspects of a patient’s health: providing wellness coaching and consultation about medical concerns, prescribing and administering drug treatments, preventing illness and injury, and the list goes on. Their one-on-one interaction with a patient represents a unique relationship that’s rooted in mutual trust, empathy, and informed consent.
The road to become an HCP is long, requiring extensive education in complex topics like bioethics, psychology, physiology, and biochemistry. In addition to patient care, some HCPs perform biomedical or clinical research that furthers their knowledge of the field. Because they’re familiar with their patients’ needs, HCPs are often the ones who make patients aware of clinical research opportunities. Once connected with clinical trial opportunities, a patient may experience symptom relief from the drug candidates that medicinal chemists developed. In this sense, HCPs close the gap between patients and the biopharmaceutical industry. More importantly, they close the gap between patients and an improved quality of life.
A Tour of Health Care Professions
There are too many types of HCPs to count, but they all leverage chemistry and public health to some degree. Physicians (doctors) are among the most well-known, and most of them specialize in a distinct area of human health. Notable examples of chemistry-focused physicians are oncologists, who specialize in cancer care and work closely with chemotherapy; pathologists, who perform lab tests on human tissues to diagnose and treat disease; and immunologists, who are experts in the intricacies of the immune system.
When it comes to treating infectious diseases, immunologists are just one of many resources. If you contract a disease like COVID-19 and require advanced treatment, you might encounter multiple other types of HCPs. Your first, go-to resource is likely a general practitioner (GP), a profession broadly overlapping with that of a primary care physician (PCP). As the names imply, they both provide direct patient care as a “first line of defense” in support of a patient’s health. Your PCP is your first point of contact when you have a mild health concern, or when you’re well and just seeking an annual checkup. GPs are one kind of PCP, but “PCP” is an umbrella term that can technically refer to any go-to physician.
Based on your current state, your GP may simply prescribe you a COVID-19 medication and send you on your way. But if you’re exhibiting severe, long-lasting, or highly concerning symptoms, you might benefit more from emergency care. If your health is poor enough, you might even bypass the GP altogether and go straight to the hospital instead. In the hospital’s emergency room, emergency physicians will be ready to take care of you. Equipped with sharp decision-making skills and a desire to help people when they’re most vulnerable, emergency physicians intervene in urgent, complex, and life-threatening health scenarios. They also work closely with a wide range of other specialists to connect patients to follow-up care.
One such specialist is a respiratory therapist (RT), an expert in treating lung dysfunction and breathing issues. First, the RT evaluates the patient using tests that reveal quantitative information about their lung function, oxygen levels, respiration, and more. With a physician’s or nurse’s input, an RT designs a treatment plan for the COVID-19 patient’s long-term recovery. For a successful recovery, the RT educates the patient about their lung issues and monitors their condition over time. Complex lung issues might be escalated to a pulmonologist, a physician who specializes in treating lung problems.
Since the course of a COVID-19 infection can be unpredictable, with some patients drastically improve or deteriorate unexpectedly, it’s important for the health care team to carefully track a COVID-19 patient’s status. Sometimes, monitoring the patient’s external signs and symptoms just isn’t enough. It might be more effective to inspect what’s happening inside of the patient’s body. This is where a medical imaging team can step in. These specialists utilize elaborate techniques, like ultrasound imaging, magnetic resonance imaging systems (MRIs), and computed tomography (CT), to visualize interior organs and structures. Specialists gathering the images might be imaging technicians or radiologic technologists, operating intricate equipment to create pictures of the body. Afterward, physicians called radiologists use those images to diagnose and treat the patient’s condition.
A multitude of other HCPs might support a COVID-19 patient, depending on symptoms and the nature of the infection. Follow-up care becomes especially important in long COVID cases. Long COVID is a COVID-19 complication where survivors experience mental and physical symptoms in the aftermath of their infection. This complication can be debilitating for some patients. It may interfere with their normal ability to function, or introduce chronic conditions that they didn’t have before contracting COVID-19. A collaborative team of HCPs, working across diverse specialties, can help alleviate the burden of long COVID. When thinking of HCPs, you might picture physicians first, but health care relies upon many professions beyond just doctors.
Can you be a doctor without becoming a doctor?
All physicians have core training in areas like communication, problem-solving, and social skills. That being said, physician specialists come in all forms, and each specialty requires a unique set of skills. So, if you’re determined to become an HCP but not sure what you’d specialize in, there’s probably a medical specialty out there that suits your unique strengths and personality. And if you come to the conclusion that no specialty suits you just right, that’s okay, too. The health care realm also needs GPs, and even non-physician HCPs.
Some HCPs, like physician assistants (PAs) and nurses, interact with patients and can do similar tasks as a physician, but with a more limited scope. For example, they can’t perform surgeries and may not be qualified to treat conditions independently. (That being said, there are several levels of nursing, with advanced degrees generally allowing more autonomy.) Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians handle drug prescriptions, educate patients about how to use medications properly, and coordinate patient care with physicians and PAs.
Currently, these non-physician HCPs fill an urgent gap for patients. In settings where a physician isn’t available, other types of HCP might provide the patient with high-quality care. For instance, a patient might try to schedule a consultation with a particular physician, but there is an umpteen-months-long waiting list for an appointment, or that physician simply isn’t accepting new patients. A more timely alternative might be to turn to a PA or nurse who is still capable of treating the ailment. Some underserved communities and rural areas might not have easy access to well-connected medical facilities or large networks of physicians. Having other HCPs, like PAs or nurse practitioners, available locally is a huge asset for these patients, as they provide primary and sometimes specialty care.
Can you be a double-doctor?
So much of the health care industry relies upon research. From biomedical research in a lab context to clinical research with real-world study participants, research is how we continue to discover and implement all of the therapeutics and treatment techniques that make the modern medical field so advanced.
There’s a direct link between the research pursuits that convert an idea into a medicine and the patients who benefit from them. Helping patients is why physicians do what they do, and biomedical research is what enables those physicians to do it. With the medical and research fields so deeply interconnected, it can be difficult to decide between careers like these. Fortunately, you don’t have to.
The role of a physician-scientist is exactly what it sounds like: a physician who performs scientific research and clinical care. People in this career boast two prestigious credentials: a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree that qualifies them as a physician and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree that qualifies them as a researcher. Individually, each of these degrees can give you a powerful insight into human health. Together, they take your impact even further.
Earning one doctorate degree is a long and intense process, so why would anyone choose to earn two? A physician-scientist’s MD/PhD gives them a well-rounded perspective on patient wellness that can’t necessarily be obtained through one degree alone. While conducting biomedical research, they already know what health needs are worth researching, because they’ve encountered patients with those needs. Contrarily, their PhD training taught them how to problem-solve like a scientist. Asking meaningful questions, thinking critically, and drawing educated conclusions are useful skills even when caring for patients in a clinical setting. The physician-scientist career path isn’t common (a single-digit percentage of U.S. medical students pursue MD/PhD degrees), but it’s an enriching one. Trained in research and clinical skill sets, these individuals are well-prepared for the evolving landscape of the health care industry.
Medical school alone doesn’t teach students how to execute research, which is why pursuing a PhD is still necessary. The “PhD” portion of an MD/PhD program often focuses on a field related to human health: cell biology, genetics, pharmacology, and many more. By understanding the nature of fields like these, MD/PhD students gain a unique perspective on the physiological, hereditary, and biochemical aspects of disease. This goes a long way in shaping their approach to clinical research and patient care. It also trains them how to use lab-adjacent strategies, like the drug discovery process, to confront and resolve disease. Physician-scientists might choose to conduct laboratory research, clinical research, or a combination of the two. This way, they get to examine how diseases work and witness how those same diseases impact patients.
Both medicine and biomedical research can be busy, stressful vocations at times. They demand a strong commitment to improving human health, by both serving patients on the front line of clinical care and from within the walls of a laboratory or other research setting. But if you’re up for the challenge, a career as a physician-scientist might be ideal for you. As an MD/PhD student, you can look forward to devoted mentorship and hands-on learning opportunities. The heavily-intertwined MD and PhD curricula make your degree feel like one cohesive program rather than two distinct ones. To prepare, think carefully about how an MD/PhD degree would support your goals, and seek a solid foundation in research before you apply. Once you take the leap, you’ll set out on a path like no other: one that will put you in a position to directly influence the future of health care.
The Future of Health Care Professions
Based on the variety of career options, it may seem like there’s a health care job out there for everyone. Yet, we also mentioned that this industry faces serious gaps that ultimately affect patients. Why is this the case? What contributes to HCP shortages in the first place?
Despite being a lucrative and rewarding career, the work of an HCP is not easy. Sometimes administrative and socioeconomic barriers prevent patients from accessing the care they need. To an extent, these barriers are beyond the HCP’s control. COVID-19 forced many HCPs into burnout, and among those who didn’t quit the profession altogether, some HCPs never fully recovered. Some people wanted to become HCPs, but witnessing the unsupportive health care system’s flaws during the pandemic deterred them. All in all, an HCP shortage is projected at least through 2037 — including tens of thousands of physicians and hundreds of thousands of nurses.
Chances are, you’ve stood in long lines at a pharmacy or sat for hours in a hospital’s crowded waiting room. It’s natural to become frustrated by these situations, but remember that HCPs are doing their best with what they have. Despite its challenges, health care is a very special career where you can make a valuable, unparalleled impact on patients. There’s a reason why people join the profession in the first place, and it’s because improving patients’ health matters. That’s a worthwhile purpose no matter which health-related career you pursue. As an HCP, you’ll use public health and chemistry to help people every day.
Conclusion
If chemistry is your calling and public health is your passion, you don’t need to choose between them. There are a plethora of critical, fulfilling career options that encompass both. Chemistry confronts disease on a small, physiological scale, while public health approaches it from a population level. Together, they present a dynamic strategy for creating and implementing meaningful medical solutions. We can find chemistry and public health coexisting anywhere there’s a health problem to be addressed — in laboratories, hospitals, research facilities, and everywhere in between. These two fields profoundly contribute to one another and to people’s well-being, and your contributions will make them even stronger.