Joshua Wong always expected his artistic streak to lead him to a career in architecture or fashion design. But a summer volunteering with a medical/surgical burn unit in Southeast Asia changed his life.
“I specifically remember seeing this child who had surgery the year before go from being an outcast to first in his class just because he could now hold a pen and close his eyes and read,” Wong says, remembering that first of many summers spent volunteering overseas. “That’s when I decided that I want to look after burn patients.”
Wong quickly switched focus, completing medical school at the University of Alberta before specializing in plastic surgery and, later, burn treatment in Seattle. For Wong, though, a career as a plastic surgeon didn’t mean abandoning his creative impulses, but simply rethinking them.
“It comes from the Greek word plastikos, which means to remake, or remodel. That means that if you’ve got some injury or you’ve got cancer or you’re missing tissue, [plastic surgery] is where you rebuild. And so as I looked into it more I fell in love with it because it harmonized my creative passion with my sense of wanting to help people.”
In addition to providing care to burn survivors, Wong is also concerned with improving the care environment, whether that means developing AI-powered apps to help diagnose skin cancers or advocating for better work conditions for surgeons and medical residents.
“One of the big lessons I’ve learned is to be less self- and more team- and patient-oriented,” Wong says. “There’s a huge range of how you can run your practice and what kinds of things you see, but the reward of being ‘in the trenches’ is treating the sick and the walking wounded. It’s that humility component that has really impacted me.”
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
