The Village GP She Never Became... Yet – Dr Mimi Mukwevho
Why Did I Become A Doctor South Africa
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Dr Mimi Mukwevho decided she was going to be a doctor when she was about ten years old. There was a GP in her village with a small practice, and every time she went there she thought it was the most impressive place in the world. Years later she found out several of his children had become doctors too. She wanted to be like him, and she wanted her practice to be in her hometown.
She grew up in a village in Venda that was one of the first in the area to get electricity, which she says meant she didn't realise she was rural until she moved to the city. Her mother teaches at the high school Mimi herself attended. Her father is a pastor. Education, she says, was not optional in that house or in that province.
This is her first podcast, and it ranges much wider than we expected. Why she never wanted to operate, and worked out early that general practice was what she actually meant when she said "doctor". The fight with her father that decided which university she went to. The talk he gave her in a bare residence room, sitting on the chair and telling her to picture it as her consulting room, with the desk here and the patient there. What she announced in a lecture hall when someone asked why she wanted to be a doctor, which involved curing HIV and, she admits now, cannabis.
Then the part nobody plans for. She wanted psychiatry. She applied for the posts, wrote the letters, and heard nothing back. What she found instead was clinical research, and the discovery that doctors can work as something other than doctors. She was on HIV vaccine trials when the pandemic arrived, watching from inside the research world as the country argued about a vaccine, and learning how quickly bad information travels.
Since then she has built a practice with no building. She consults almost entirely through a screen, and she makes a case for it that is worth hearing whether you agree or not. That telehealth is primary care rather than a threat to it, that the regulators and the legislation have not caught up, and that the profession's real problem is not the doctors who are unsure about it but the ones who are hostile to the colleagues doing it.
And running underneath all of it, a thing she tells her own patients constantly. Here is my name, here is my HPCSA number, here is my practice number. Go and check me. Come back and then we can talk about what is true and what isn't.
We also get into why everyone from Limpopo seems to be well educated, whether Johannesburg is actually unfriendly or just busy, and the one thing her province is apparently famous for exporting.
GUEST
Dr Muimeleli "Mimi" Mukwevho — general practitioner
TikTok: @drmimi_mukwevho
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