A HEART SET ON MEDICINE
From the age of eight, Dr Nikki Stamp was geared towards healing. Now one of an elite group of female cardiac surgeons, she advocates for gender equality in her field as well as better awareness of women’s heart issues.
Dr Nikki Stamp FRACS is a cardiothoracic surgeon, one of just 11 female heart surgeons in Australia. Her clinical work is at the forefront of cardiothoracic surgery, including transplants and congenital heart disease.
As an eight-year-old, Nikki Stamp knew she wanted to be a cardiac surgeon. After seeing Australian heart surgeon Dr Victor Chang in the news working on an artifical heart valve, she wrote in her diary, “When I grow up I want to be a heart surgeon and finish the work of Dr Victor Chang”.
However, as a teen her interests moved to music. It was only when her father asked her at the end of high school, “If you could be anything at all in the world, regardless of marks or prerequisites, what would it be?” that she knew immediately the answer: a doctor. Because she didn’t have the marks for medicine she had to first study science and then transfer. “I’d never thought I was smart enough to study the difficult subjects like maths or chemistry. When I had this goal in mind, though, I surprised myself.”
As a medical student, Dr Stamp was always going to be a surgeon, despite being told it is not a great career for women. “When I was a junior doctor,
I got given a rotation in cardiac surgery. I loved it so much, I never left. I love the technical and intellectual challenge, the teamwork and the patients. To see their resilience and gratitude for their health never gets old.”
It takes approximately 10 years to become a specialist. Surgical training programmes are usually around six years long but there is a lot of work either side of that. “We rotate through different hospitals, learning how to do the surgeries and also the vast amounts of theory behind it. At the end of that, we sit massive exams and then you’re qualified as a specialist. The day I passed my final exam is still the best day of my life!” says Dr Stamp.
It was in the last few years of her training that Dr Stamp began noticing the differences in gender in medicine and surgery. “There are more than enough women who want to do surgery and are capable of doing it but we can’t get them into those positions,” she says. According to the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, women account for just 11 per cent of consultant surgeons in Australasia, despite the fact that around 60 per cent of medical students are women.
“Surgery still holds many biases, both explicit and implicit, which means there are so many more barriers for women. It’s still sadly a boys’ club and while it’s changing, in my opinion it’s not fast enough and it’s incumbent on those in positions of power to make change.”
Dr Stamp has experienced discrimination throughout her career but rather than letting these experiences break her, they inspired her passion projects like mentoring female students through the University of Western Australia and being a representative of the #ILookLikeASurgeon movement.
When it comes to looking after her own health Dr Stamp says exercise is key. “Exercise is the cornerstone of my own health. When I exercise, I feel better physically and mentally, I eat better, I sleep better. Everything just falls into place. I’m also getting better at saying ‘no’ – if I exhaust myself, then there’s nothing left to give for myself or for other people.”
It was a wake-up call regarding her own health that led Dr Stamp to writing her new book, Pretty Unhealthy: Why our obsession with looking healthy is making us sick (Murdoch Books). After months of feeling so tired that she’d struggle to make it through the day, Dr Stamp decided to stop dismissing her symptoms and be a patient. She learnt from her GP that she had high blood pressure. It was partly hereditary but Dr Stamp says, “I knew I hadn’t been taking care of myself, letting my exercise lapse and eating foods that were not that healthy. I had managed to hide these feelings and pretend everything was fine. After all, I looked fine”.
Dr Stamp says, “It struck me when I looked at the vast majority of health books and magazine headlines as well as the massive pool of Instagram content, that we actually associate being beautiful or looking a certain way with being healthy. This has absolutely nothing to do with health. So I started to investigate firstly what we think health is, all the ways we’re bombarded with pressure to look a certain way, the ever-growing amount of bad-quality information and what effect this has on our mental and physical wellbeing.”
One of the key messages of Pretty Unhealthy is that Dr Stamp wants people to look at the health information we’re given with a degree of skepticism and to start trying to undo some of the harmful messages we’ve been told about health, what it is and how to be healthy. “I know for me, that was a process I went through writing the book and it’s absolutely changed my own approach to my health and how I treat my patients.”
Dr Stamp also makes time for advocacy work, particularly around women’s heart health. “Heart disease is the number one killer of women. Most women don’t know they are three times as likely to die of a heart attack than breast cancer.
“There is so much work to do around awareness and improving the medical profession’s response and ultimately, that will save lives. I’m just one voice but when we all come together, it’s possible to create real change.”
“I never thought I was smart enough to study difficult subjects like maths or chemistry.”