Everything you need to know before you date a medical student

We can tell when we make your heart skip a beat (literally)


We get it, you want to date a doctor but can’t find one, so you think locking down a medical student will have the same end result. But before you go to stake out Guy’s bar, here’s a few things you should know.

We’ll complain about Jeremy Hunt for hours

Get used to listening to rant after rant about how Jeremy Hunt is ruining our future, patient safety and destroying the NHS. Also prepare for some bad puns about how his name sounds like a rude word.

We’ll sometimes smell like a dissecting room

Part of our course involves looking inside a cadaver, and the smell is harder to get rid of than TB. The smell of formaldehyde is the least sexy scent since the lynx -doused days of year 9, so get ready to lose all attraction to us every couple of weeks.

You’ll have to deal with medical student syndrome

It’s stupid we know, but every single thing we learn about, we’ll think we’ve got. We learn about arrhythmias, we think we can feel our heart beating wrong. We learn about necrotising fasciitis and if we graze our knee we think our leg is going to be eaten by bacteria. Just tell us how stupid we’re being and eventually we’ll realise it’s pretty unlikely we managed to develop anything from listening to a lecture.

We can’t be your own personal doctor

We’re still medical students. Not actual doctors. Our most common advice is “Go to your GP. If we date, we can’t be your own personal physician because we’re not qualified to be anyone’s yet. We don’t know how to treat your weird rash, we don’t know what’s wrong with your feet, and to be honest, we don’t really want to look.

We will use you as a test subject

Every medical student has done it, you’ll be lying in bed with us, and what you think is flirty stroking is actually us counting your ribs and mapping out the boundaries of your heart. Whenever you’re trying to chill out, we’ll bug you to take your blood pressure, and listen to every part of your upper body with a stethoscope. But if you can deal with all that…

We’ll do roleplay better than you’ve ever done before

It’s a classic situation, but we do it best. We know the lingo, we have the equipment, and we’ll use that stethoscope in ways that are definitely not best medical practice