My attending likes to cross out things. He does so quite liberally. "This isn't right. There's a 3/6 holosystolic murmur at the apex." And then he'll line out the finding and rewrite it. The same goes for plans. "No, we're going to give vanco. He's from a nursing home and needs MRSA coverage." Line out.
I quite literally measure the quality of my notes by the number of times he crosses something out. He sees my notes nowadays as writes his little agree with above thing, and I feel good. It was a good note. Then I see the intern's note, and there are so many line outs that my attending's written his own note.
Just goes to show you something that I've loved about medicine. You can be the most knowledgeable person around, but it's meaningless if you don't have the skills of being a doctor.
Medical students that work with me know that everything I teach will never be on their tests, but they always have a good time, because I don't teach them how to pass a test. I teach them how to be doctors.
I'd say you're not a bad person but the last you said, Isn't that pretentious?
ReplyDeleteIt's not pretentious. It certainly may sound that way, but I'd say that 80% of being a good doctor has nothing to do with anything we can measure on a standardized test.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I'm interested in teaching. And I'm not the best doctor in the world. I'm not even the best resident. But I am a doctor, and I do care enough to try to teach students what it means to be a doctor.