In last week's column, we re-examined our routines as we began a new school year, determined to start things right.
As students have settled into their classes and are just starting to hit the books, the rest of us can sit back and relax. Right?
As any physician can attest, the learning never stops.
The hardest first day of school was my first day at medical school. We started anatomy lectures that very first day which ended in the gross anatomy lab itself. There we met the cadavers we would be dissecting as we immersed our minds in the infinite details of the human body.
We felt behind from day one, and the question that haunted every medical student was, "Will I ever know enough?"
We learned a great deal in medical school. There was no limit to the detail and depth we could study. Any detail could be clinically relevant and not only be the difference between passing and failing but life and death.
We were told that we were learning enough medical words to constitute a whole new language. No wonder normal people have difficulty understanding what their doctors are saying.
But in spite of the hours of study in libraries, in labs and on hospital wards, all that we learned in medical school was not enough to make us great doctors.
Good doctors learn from their patients. That may be one reason why we say we practise medicine. And I guess patients do have to be patient - waiting for a young doctor to practise on them until they get good at it.
Now don't take that to mean that older docs are better or safer than rookie physicians. The most dangerous physician - whether young or old - is one who is overconfident. We can make mistakes if we step beyond our scope of practice, if we don't recognize and respect our personal limitations, if we stop listening, and if we jump to conclusions.
Both inexperienced and jaded physicians may assume that a patient's symptoms are due to the most common diagnosis.
They may jump to a quick diagnosis even if the signs and symptoms don't quite match.
An astute physician will listen to his intuition and maintain a broad differential diagnosis. When symptoms don't quite fit, he will ask more questions.
If you find that your physician may have rushed to make your diagnosis, you can open her mind by asking, "What's the worst thing it could be?" and "What else could it be?"
These questions force physicians to pause and look at all the information again, reformulating a broader differential diagnosis of all the possibilities, including the less probable but more serious.
I continue to learn from my patients as they learn from their experiences and relationships. And what I learn from them enriches my care of other patients.
Real life teaches grownups in ways much different from school or practice. In life, lessons come after the tests. We learn by failing. We succeed by first falling.
As we grow older, gain knowledge from experience and grow wiser, the more we recognize how little we know. As teens and young adults, we may think we know a lot more than our parents, but as we face the challenges of independence and parenthood, we may better recognize their wisdom.
May you never believe that you are too old to learn something new.
Even if you become forgetful, you will have to relearn what you used to know.
Dr. Davidicus Wong is a family physician and writer. See davidicuswong.word press.com for more.
