Welcome!

My name’s Farah (but my surname’s not Esmerelda!!) and I’m an Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology doctor in the UK. I have been a medical doctor for about 7 years and I’m currently undertaking an #NIHR research project in the hope of doing a PhD in the near future and becoming a
Doctor Doctor! Currently I’m looking at the gut microbiome- a community of microbes (‘bugs’ or bacteria/viruses/fungi) that we all have naturally living in us. This community has increasingly been shown to effect our health and well being and is an exciting area of current and future research.

My job is pretty varied as a result- sometimes I’m seeing patients; I’m training to teach Advanced Life Support; pretty soon I’ll be answering microbiology calls and in hospital labs; and as part of my research project I’m in University labs extracting DNA from stool, running chromatography on breath samples, and learning computer programming…! I also have an interest in Global Health and am a charity mentor, and I LOVE parasites so I like to talk about them!

I started this blog after I started my Instagram page when I became a registrar in February this year. I’ve never been bold enough to think my opinion truly mattered but in a world where experts are increasingly shunned and the NHS is so underfunded, I realised that actually perhaps I can add a lot of value- I can:

• help junior doctors with their training choices
• hopefully inspire budding healthcare professionals and scientists
• share with you the often difficult journey of learning to be an “expert” and show you how much work goes into that
• tell you about how to try to stay healthy when you’re stressed
• empower patients to learn more about their health, especially if we lose the NHS as we know it 
• connect with, learn from and learn-through-teaching you all too

 

If there’s anything you think would help you then please contact me via @dresmerelda on Instagram.

Enjoy!

#infectiousdiseases #microbiology #medicalstudents #doctors #lifelonglearner #science #research