It may seem melodramatic but doctors can picture patients who they lost decades later. They can see the anguish on the faces of parents who they had to tell their child had died.

I have worked in warcrimes forensics and if you think for a second I don't carry the memories of what a teenagers body looks like when it's riddled with bullets from an AK-47, what the look on a mother's face when she begs us to finally find her son among the dozens of mangled, commingled skeletons, clothing and hair in an earthen pit, the sound of a father weeping when he watches you lift another corpse from the ground, then you're insane. I will carry those memories with me for the rest of my life.

Many jobs have dark sides that we have to deal with. My current work allows me to work with people who have been institutionally marginalized for a century, who's children sometimes grow up in broken homes around drugs and alcohol and suicide and death. The work that I do is supposed to help people get back some of the culture and heritage that our society and government stripped away and continues to deny. That's why I don't think you're argument is fair. My training isn't done once I finish my PhD. I have a post-doc and then struggling to get on the tenure track and then I have five years of publish or perish before I get a real job and that whole time I'm dealing with watching the people I work with go through from real fucking serious shit as part of the cycle of violence and institutionalized racism that plagues indigenous communities in Canada. My work isn't apolitical and it exists in this world.

I'm not the one downplaying medical science. If you see my other comments, I have nothing but respect for medical doctors including some of my best friends and my father. You were the one downplaying all PhD holders, despite the fact that we are a wildly diverse group of academics.