What is Professionalism to me? How do I practice it?
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- Written by AINO MIRJAM INKERI KELO
Right from the beginning of my professional career, it was very clear for me that the patient had to occupy centre stage. As I practised medicine, I understood that this preference had to be translated into practical choices, which were sometimes small but nonetheless fundamental.
`a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity` (World Health Organisation, WHO) relative state in which one is able to function well physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually in order to express the full range of one's unique potentialities within the environment in which one is living. (Dorlands Medical Dictionary)
I am twenty six years old and I study electronic engineering. When I was eight, I had an illness, wrongly diagnosed initially as a tumour on the brain, but which left me with a damaged optic nerve, and badly affected my eyesight. As a result I often wondered about suffering and the reasons for it.
The connection between health and old age is complex and often influenced by myths and misconceptions. It is argued that old age is equivalent to a time of illness. Medicine itself has endorsed this idea, to such an extent that gerontology has even been defined as the science that traces the downward trends... 
