Rohit Sane: The Fifth Generation Of Surgeons In His Family

Rohit Sane is the fifth consecutive surgeon in his family. His father is a urosurgeon. His grandfather was a general surgeon. So was his great grandfather, in a small town in Maharashtra, before the family moved to Mumbai. Rohit is the first orthopaedic surgeon among them. He describes a path into medicine that is difficult to comprehend from Australia. Roughly 1.5 million people apply for medical school in India each year. Then, after five and a half years of medical school, the postgraduate entrance exam. Three and a half hours, around 200 multiple choice questions, sat by 240,000 doctors in a single sitting. Your entire career depends on it, and as Rohit puts it, you can miss one question and find ten thousand people separated from you by a single mark. He is candid about what passing it took. Waking up and studying until you sleep, every subject weighted and strategised, revision on revision, then sitting the exam and hoping. There is also a detour worth hearing about. Young and, by his own account, naive enough to listen to other people, he did an MD in pharmacology and interned at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. Two months in he understood that his calling was surgical, sat the entrance exam again, and got into orthopaedics. He talks about what drew him to bones, the instant feedback of a fixed tibia, and why shoulder surgery in particular. It is still developing in India, which he sees as an opportunity rather than a limitation. Recorded near the end of his fellowship year in Brisbane, with his wife back in Mumbai expecting their first child, and 25 publications and a residents' arthroscopy handbook already behind him. His advice for surgeons applying from India is blunt, and comes from the other side of the inbox. Decide what you actually want to specialise in before you email anybody.