Aspergers and medical school? Possible?

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I know I've come across posts from people on the spectrum who are pre-med, however I haven't seen any doctors posting to the site who also have any form of autism. I pursued pre-med myself in undergrad then went on to the hospitality industry after working in restaurants to afford my bachelor's. I'm now still pining for my long lost dream of becoming a doctor... I was diagnosed with Asperger's in 2012 and at this point in my life I feel I've grown enough and have gained understanding of my condition. Also starting to read books like Living Well on the Spectrum has made me rethink my possibilities.

Are any of you in med school and on the spectrum? Did you have to or need to or refuse to disclose your condition during the interviewing process?

Also would like to hear from people who are planning on becoming doctors and thoughts on how they decided and how they work around limitations etc.

Thanks in advance!

I go to a doctor with Aspergers and he is brilliant. His ability to make sense of a confusing pattern of symptoms has saved my life in the past. His special interest is collecting watches, he has a quirky sense of humour, and I am very thankful that I found him. He is very clever scientifically - came top of med school in his year, very warm and friendly and diagnosed me as having suffered strokes in five minutes after three other NT doctors before him had mucked around coming up with wrong and potentially life-threatening misdiagnosis that were so wrong they were laughable.

He comes from another culture so perhaps at med school here his "peculiarities" were put down to that..

His ability to hold several possibilites in his sharp mind simultaneously and make sense of inter-relationships is a gift to the medical profession and his patients. He doesn't just say "let's run some tests and see what happens". He has a brilliant intuition that together with his knowledge and pattern recognition just takes my breath away (in a good way!)

I think anything is possible and I don't see why you can't become a doctor, if that's what you want. But I would be very careful as to what kind of doctor you want to be and make sure that your autism doesn't get in the way of you being able to do your job. For example. Being a surgeon may not be a good idea for you, not because you can't do the work in-and-of-itself, in fact, I think you could do a great job at it. It's because you have to be in one place for a long time, in bright light and with other people around you. and you just can't just drop everything and go to a quiet room and decompress when you have a sensory overload and that's where your limitations lie in this field.

That's a really good point. Choose the speciality that will give you flexibility and make use of your particular abilities.

I think a doctor with AS might have a special ability working in their favor. One of the biggest problems in medicine is a tendency for practitioners is make assumptions and "read people." These assumptions and these readings can go very wrong and be way off track. Most people with an ASD lack many of the nonverbal cue reading abilities and sense of unspoken rules and assumptions. Thus their diagnostic skills and analysis rely almost exclusively on empirical information and data rather than their feelings.

Yes, it's totally possible. If that's what you wanna do, then do it. I know of at least one med school student on here, but I don't remember his/her name. You can go through some older posts where people were saying specifically which specialty they went into. I remember one person commenting about how a lot of the aspies they knew were MD/PhDs (which is my plan), since less patient interaction is involved, so if you're interested in research, that's always an option.

Also, if you're interested, there's also a couple of us aspie pre-meds over at SDN .

For me, I would think the odors, people, graphic scenes, constant having to multitask would keep me from being a doctor, for the same reason I think nursing is about the worst career someone with an ASD could have.

The question I have is: The other worst career would be in food service and how do you tolerate being in the hospitality industry?

How I tolerate hospitality industry is that I work in a very tolerable kitchen, there are florescent lights but I can wear a ball cap so it blocks it out, I work in fine dining the food smells wonderful and I also work with only 3 other people who are so far very accepting of me because I do meticulous work. It took me 10 years to get to this point, in that time I worked in a lot of bad kitchens and would come home and smoke quite a lot of pot to forget about the stress, at which point it caught up to me.

Environment in any profession is crucial to the success of the job for an Aspie. You could take an Aspie and place them in an open office concept and ask them to program then take that same person and put them in a quiet dim-lit room and give them the same task. Which Aspie would thrive in which environment? Highly up to the individual. Also not all of us have sensory difficulties, I do, though.

I believe that anything is possible when you have a dream. I think you'd make a great doctor.

Yes, it is possible if you work at it hard enough and hone your medical skills. Being Aspie, you will likely have an advantage on the amount of concentration you can do on things. The key to success is to never give up (unless there is no other choice but to). You will need to study 24/7 for all of the core requirements, but it can pay off in the end. I wish you good luck on your career path.