How the Liberal Arts Prepare You for Medicine

Every Christian who wants to be a doctor should attend New Saint Andrews College. The liberal arts are the long-acknowledged best preparation for the professions — Law, Medicine, and Ministry — and New Saint Andrews has emerged as the most rigorous and most faithful college in our time.

I currently practice as a General Internist, a doctor trained in diagnosis and the care of the sickest patients. A career in medicine was my passion before I began thinking carefully about where to attend college. Looking back, the only regret I have about going to New Saint Andrews before medical school is that I did not go there longer.

My Story

Okay, so there you are. You are a young man, late teens or early twenties, and you have decided: “I want to go into medicine.” But you ask: “Why should I get a liberal arts degree?”

Most young men are making the wrong decision and going to a state college. 

Rather, you really should get a liberal arts degree. That is what I am saying. It is the best and, I think, the only optimal way to prepare for medical school.

When I was 15 or 16 years old, the TV show Lost came out. The pilot opens with a man in a suit lying in the jungle, and when he stands up and steps out onto the beach, he sees a crashed jumbo jet with an engine on fire and people swarming and panicking everywhere. This man runs toward the danger. He helps a pregnant woman through contractions, tells her how to breathe, and has someone time them, then moves on to the next person who cannot breathe, talking a bystander out of a bad idea along the way. He is Jack Shepard, a neurosurgeon. He is a leader. He has practical skills. He is competent. He, of course, has his own demons to fight, but he is a hero, not just in the operating room or as a doctor, but everywhere he goes. I saw that show, and I thought: I want that. I wanted that identity.

At that time, I was at Logos School, competing with a really good cohort of young men who were excellent at school and sports and were genuinely obedient Christians. I liked working hard. I was doing mock trial in the mornings and a sport in the afternoons and staying up late doing homework, and I loved it. So I thought: here is an attractive vocation that involves heroism, that garners honor and respect, and I like working hard. Let me look into it.

I read Lewis Thomas, a really funny doctor-writer who writes essays about medicine and science. I read Complications by Atul Gawande, a surgeon, and I really liked the picture of the medical world he painted. I decided to go for it. I went through college, took extra time to get a really good liberal arts degree, studied microbiology at a university, and applied to medical school three times over four years, which is not unusual. At age 26, I was accepted. During that time, I got married, started a family, and had one child with another on the way when I entered medical school.

I did four years at the University of Washington, which is the top-ranked medical school in the country, and then three years at a really excellent residency program. By age 33, I was a fully independent practicing physician. Now I am 36, have been practicing independently for almost 3 years, and I just love it. I am a general practitioner. I spend a lot of my time diagnosing,  thinking about what is causing that pain, whether we are sure it is the gallbladder or something else, what tests can tell us what the truth is. There is a lot of detective work, which I love. There are chronic diseases that improve with changed habits and diet, so I spend a lot of time convincing people to stop doing the things that are destroying them, which is a wonderful challenge. And because there is a doctor shortage and a shortage of certain specialists (rheumatologists, endocrinologists, etc.) I get involved in work that used to be over a generalist's head, but now, with the internet, I can quickly look things up right there in front of the patient and figure out the next step that generalists in times past simply could not.

Every day it is more fun because the more you know, the more you can learn and the more you can help people. I have five kids and a good marriage, and my family is doing well. And I am astonished that I do not have 100 people calling me every week asking how to do the same thing.

Why You Should Consider Medicine

Before I say anything about New Saint Andrews, let me make the case for medicine itself, because I think most young men, and even some older men, do not fully understand what they would be entering.

The first reason to pursue this job is heroism. You can help people and save people, and it is the kind of job where every now and then a patient turns to you and says, "Thank you so much. I think you saved my life." There are other jobs where that happens, but medicine is one of them, and it is really, really excellent. When push comes to shove (like when an infection threatens the life of your child or your own), the garlic and essential oils are not so appealing, the spinal adjustments no longer hold your curiosity, and you need someone to save you. It is the kind of job where people say, "Thank you for enduring the training. It is long, and we need you."

The second reason is brotherhood. Doctors have a special kind of love and mutual help that is unique to the field, with very little of the unhealthy competition you find among lawyers or, unfortunately, among preachers. Doctors argue about the right treatments and what we are doing; that is fine and good, but when there is a patient involved, we really help each other, because it is a difficult job. When you set out on this road, you enter a really wonderful brotherhood.

The third reason is financial. Physicians are among the highest-paid workers in the country. It does require going into debt, which makes it nearly impossible to deviate from the career once you are in it — but our wages have never been higher, and they are going to keep rising. You will be making far more in your very first year of well-paid work than your total debt. Say you finish with $500,000 in debt — you will be making more than $500,000 your first year out. Live on $200,000 and start paying it off aggressively. It is going to be great.

The fourth reason is honor. Even though doctors have screwed up a lot of things — especially in COVID — and societal respect for the profession has declined, people still have tremendous respect for medicine because of the difficulty of the training and the power of the technology. We can keep people alive and rescue them from death in really tremendous ways. There is a healthy pushback against the pill-pushing, rule-following doctor who frustrates your friends and neighbors — that is a good course correction — but the honor of the profession endures.

The fifth reason is that it is endlessly intriguing, and you will never plateau. A painter learns how to paint, and after a couple of years, honestly, his skills plateau, and he is looking to create new ones — maybe he starts welding, maybe he learns to frame or roof. But being a physician is just endlessly interesting because of the people and the possibilities of diagnosis. And the path is long — about ten years of training, then you should practice for at least thirty years — and this is one of the wonderful things you should actually want. You have the chance to get really, really, really good at something that takes a long time to master. When you start to accumulate the skill, it is so valuable and so exciting.

So, do you want this job? If you like working hard, if you find satisfaction in learning something new and mastering a new concept, if you like applying knowledge to get something done rather than just contemplating it — that is a good sign. A taste for academic work combined with a taste for action is exactly the right fit. It also helps if you have some natural cheerfulness — you do not have to be a total Pollyanna, but you are dealing with a lot of people who are in pain and in sadness, and the gift of cheerfulness matters. And if you have worked a job where you had to see a lot of people one after another — cashier, waiter, lemonade stand — and you did not find it exhausting, that is also a good sign. I worked as a cashier and a waiter, and I found that I really liked cranking through people. That is the clinical setting.

Why You Need a Christian Liberal Arts Degree

Medicine is about humans. Not just cells and molecules, but humans — souls and bodies, language and truth, suffering and healing, fear and hope, sin and redemption. A doctor must be more than a technician. A doctor must be a wise man.

COVID showed us what happens when doctors lack moral and intellectual formation. Many were spineless, lockstep, and thoughtless. They followed institutional pressure instead of exercising judgment. They lacked courage. They lacked ethical clarity. I do not want those men as colleagues. I am sick of helping them get into medical school. Doctors have so much power, and we misuse it out of ignorance and cowardice — a bad combination.

Moral Preparation: Christian Maturity and Leadership

A doctor is a leader and a teacher — to patients, to colleagues, to institutions. He also needs to be growing simultaneously as a husband, father, and churchman throughout his training. That is a lot. It takes a great deal of maturity to manage all of it at once, and that maturity is not well-learned at a public university.

Every single day, I rely on the theological and ethical framework I learned at NSA and from teachers who were engaged in the same questions. When I decide whether someone should do something — exercise a certain way, take a certain medicine, how long to take it, what the end goal is — I need a genuine understanding of good and evil. And this is not easy. Patients ask for harmful things. They ask for medications that enable destructive behavior. Smoking, diabetes, repeated bad decisions — they want medicine to fix what they will not change. Sexual ethics come up constantly. Sexual function is an important part of health, and a doctor has to know what is the healthy thing to do here. How much do I make that my business? Am I helping someone do something evil or destructive to their soul? That is a real question that requires a quick and well-prepared mind.

So many Christian doctors have no idea how to handle any of this. They just prescribe or refer and roll with it. They do not want to deal with it, and they do not know how. This is the kind of thing that takes a quick and well-prepared moral mind, and it is formed by studying under faithful Protestant teachers who take Scripture, theology, and ethics seriously.

Humanities and the Art of Diagnosis

Diagnosis begins with language. Patients speak. They describe symptoms, fears, and experiences using words, and a doctor must listen carefully and interpret those words truthfully. This is the first step of medicine. It is what makes doctors different from veterinarians, and it is one of the reasons the medical profession is such a wonderful and mysterious profession.

Being able to understand someone's words, what they mean, what they think they mean, what they are actually describing when they say that pain started "last Tuesday around dinner" — that is the essential act of diagnosis. Humanities train the mind to understand people, stories, and meaning. State universities are largely bankrupt in this area. As I was finishing college around 2010–2012, the good professors were dying and retiring, and I caught the last of them. I am pretty sure they have all retired by now. The younger ones were simply wasting time. So if you want to understand humans —their motivations, their beliefs, their stories—you need the humanities, and you need them taught well.

Medicine is detective work. You are constantly trying to figure out what is true, what is false, and what is really going on. And this is where epistemology comes in — studying philosophy deeply, reading deeply in the history of philosophy, gets you good at figuring out the truth, and this is extremely important to medicine because we are constantly relying on other experts, on studies, on an abundance of different kinds of evidence. We are always trying to weigh that evidence to find out what the truth is. At the end of that process, we have our visit with the patient, and we need to make a recommendation. You need to do something. You cannot endlessly speculate. You have to land somewhere. And so you need to get really good at figuring out which experts to trust, which guidelines to follow, which studies to pay attention to; and that is an epistemological skill. NSA does an amazing job of training men to do that. It is not like learning to solve that problem is natural or easy; it has to be formed.

This connects directly to judgment in new situations, the kind of situational ethics that medicine demands constantly. You are always encountering new cases, new fields of knowledge, and new patients whose language, story, and context you have to learn. A doctor who was never trained to think epistemologically will freeze or default to whatever the institution tells him. A doctor formed in the liberal arts will know how to reason his way to a landing. And that skill, unlike most of what you learn in medical school, compounds across an entire career.

There is also the matter of risk: taking risks, spending real money for extended periods, sacrificing effort and health along the way, and asking the honest question: health for what? What is all of this actually for? 

Medical school does not teach all of this – epistemology, risk-taking, virtue. It is not their job. State universities do not teach it either. But MDs need it hugely, and a man who has never thought carefully about the ends of human life will make a poor doctor, no matter how well he knows his pharmacology.

Men are Both Body and Soul

NSA gives students a robust, balanced understanding of the unity of body and soul — how the soul interacts with the body and vice versa — and teaches it well. They insist that their students be strong and attentive to their physical health. This matters enormously for medical doctors.

Most physicians err in one of two ways. Many err in caring only for the soul — they understand the spiritual dimension but neglect the physiological part of mental health. Others, especially in certain specialties, become obsessed with the body and neglect spiritual health altogether. NSA steers you toward a much more honest and integrated understanding of both, and since I went through NSA, I think I handle this better than most.

Why a Degree from NSA Will Work Best

The Impatience of Youth

An anxious eighteen-year-old who wants it all done by twenty-two looks at medical school and sees a checklist: prerequisites, lab research, MCAT prep, essays, volunteer work, work experience. The plan is to get it all done in college, not risk a B, and be finished by twenty-two. That plan produces, at best, a complete but boring application. He might get into a Caribbean school or a DO program, but he will be immature and single, unable to enjoy the road. He will be equipped to become a radiologist or an anesthesiologist, topping out at helping other doctors do their jobs, rather than leading.

Nobody wants a young doctor. You should not want to finish all of your medical training by twenty-six. That is an immature dream, sprung from an immature man.

The NSA Path

The path through NSA means enjoying and glorifying God at every step — a long, fruitful path. It means entering medical school in your mid-twenties as a mature man: married if God gives you a wife, with kids if God gives them. Kids before and during medical school are the norm for good men. The rest do extended frat-bro life. It means being equipped to lead other doctors, to build institutions, marriages, families, brotherhoods of physicians, and even medical schools.

Christian maturity and the work needed for a strong medical school application cannot be finished in four years. The men who try to finish everything in four years usually arrive at interviews visibly unfinished.

Why It Works Practically

An NSA degree will be interesting on your application. Medical school admissions boards will respect it and be genuinely intrigued by it. It will look dramatically more compelling than a chemistry or microbiology degree. Admissions wants someone who can relate to and understand people. MDs live in an echo chamber — scientists and other doctors, basically — and the admissions board will think: this man has a level of education that will make him able to actually talk to patients, to understand them, to lead them.

Time-wise, it takes the same amount of time or less overall. You may need a year or a year and a half to clean up science prerequisites, but you will enter as a fascinating applicant rather than just another pre-med, and that matters more than people think. A really excellent degree accelerates the admissions process in ways that are hard to quantify but very real.

Why NSA Specifically

Among Christian liberal arts colleges, NSA stands out for several reasons. The professors are truly excellent, and the rigor is right up there with the best colleges in the country. They teach courage — they model it, and they insist on it — and that is rarer than it should be. They have a genuine and well-integrated understanding of body and soul. They avoid puffing up knowledge; they have what you might call many fathers — men who take students seriously and invest in them. And they are producing a generation of young men who know how to think, lead, and suffer well.

I have been at the University of Idaho and the University of Washington. Idaho had some classes worse than community college, though it also had amazing professors who taught my parents — I caught the last of them. Washington was rubbing elbows with Ivy League caliber work. But for faithful, rigorous, integrated formation of the whole man, it simply doesn’t exist in state schools.

My Recommendation

Confirm your calling. Read about medicine. Shadow doctors. Get in touch with a doctor who will take you seriously and start eating up his valuable time, and don’t apologize for it — that is the beginning of the Hippocratic tradition.

Study God's Word under godly men. That is what NSA gives you above everything else.

Begin studying the natural world — labs and prerequisites — at a reasonable pace. Do not try to do everything at once.

Establish your house. Find a girl. Get good at being a husband. Kids before and during medical school are the norm for good men. Rely on your parents, your church, and other Christian doctors for financial support in addition to the wages from med school prep work, lab work, CNA, medical scribe, medical assistant, and EMT. These jobs are not beneath you. They are part of the formation.

Enter medical school in your mid-twenties with wisdom and confidence.

And do not be impatient to "get your life going," to start the race, to get on the path. You are on the path right now. As soon as you connect with a doctor who will invest in you, the ancient tradition begins:

To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money, to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.

That is the road. It is a long one, and you should be glad that it is.


Apply to New Saint Andrews today.