The third Find-Your-Role-Model Session in 2023 (the 73rd in total) invited Dr Satoko Nachi, a doctor who is active as a representative of the NPO Myanmar Family Clinic Garden.

Dr Nachi graduated from Dokkyo Medical University and worked as an internist at Nippon Medical School. Later, at the age of 39, she became the fifth Japanese to join Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and experienced medical aid work in many parts of the world. She decided to devote her life to Myanmar, which she visited during that time, and is currently involved in a wide range of activities, from mobile health care to spreading vegetable cultivation techniques, based on the principle of treating the lives and livelihoods of the people in Myanmar.

During the session, Dr Nachi explained her background and activities to date. Dr Nachi saw the reality that even after diagnosis and treatment, patients would relapse and return to the hospital due to poor nutrition and underdeveloped environmental infrastructure, and realised that in order to save patients, it was essential to improve nutritional conditions alongside medical treatment. She said that she made a big career choice to go into international medicine after encountering Mother Teresa's words "If you give your love to someone else, it will enrich you", which made us realise the importance of having a broad antenna to catch even small things in daily life.

She told us that she had fought against illness twice before, and we were very impressed by her story of how she strongly overcame her illness by focusing on what she could do, rather than what she could not do. As advice to us medical professionals, she said that the most important thing is to accept the differences between people who are different from each other, and to do this, she said, “Try to broaden your horizons by getting involved with people from various industries and communicating with them”.

Hearing about Dr Nachi's experience as a doctor working to support people's overall livelihoods in Myanmar was a very valuable opportunity for us to think about the breadth of our future career, and at the same time, to be encouraged that we can develop our own path as much as we want.