Have you ever started a new rotation, say a surgical rotation, and expected that you will walk away with some experience from that specialty, say learning to perform the best stitches in the world, but walked away learning more about something entirely unrelated, say about the politics among surgeons or how many cholecystectomy are performed daily?
Or have you completed a critical care ward having learned more about reading radiologic imaging than knowing how to manage hypothermia?
I once walked into a cardiology rotation expecting to become somewhat of an expert, among my peers at least, to spot the exact telltale signs of Brugada syndrome. Instead, I finished the rotation knowing more about the dangers of chronic hypertension, cardiac-related syncopes, and anomalous presentations of heart attacks only as abdominal pain!
One of the truly wonderful aspects of medicine is what I call “unexpected learning”. We learn so much more from “things that go wrong,” or “things that defy rudimentary expectations,” than normalcy. I can recall countless times where I gained my expertise in something, doing ultrasound-guided injection, in the least expected environment, during my rural primary care rotation instead of during my preventative medicine & rehabilitation (PM&R) month. After so many times of being thrown off course, fortunately, I learned that the only thing expected is the unexpected and the only thing certain is uncertainty.
It is these unexpected outcomes that are key to our ability to adapt and learn new behaviors and thus make medicine one of the most challenging yet interesting fields. Can you imagine if medicine is all rote learning, entirely algorithmic, and all diseases present the same (all hoof beats are horses and never zebras)?
*This post has been published on Medscape's "Differential Blog."
Or have you completed a critical care ward having learned more about reading radiologic imaging than knowing how to manage hypothermia?
I once walked into a cardiology rotation expecting to become somewhat of an expert, among my peers at least, to spot the exact telltale signs of Brugada syndrome. Instead, I finished the rotation knowing more about the dangers of chronic hypertension, cardiac-related syncopes, and anomalous presentations of heart attacks only as abdominal pain!
One of the truly wonderful aspects of medicine is what I call “unexpected learning”. We learn so much more from “things that go wrong,” or “things that defy rudimentary expectations,” than normalcy. I can recall countless times where I gained my expertise in something, doing ultrasound-guided injection, in the least expected environment, during my rural primary care rotation instead of during my preventative medicine & rehabilitation (PM&R) month. After so many times of being thrown off course, fortunately, I learned that the only thing expected is the unexpected and the only thing certain is uncertainty.
It is these unexpected outcomes that are key to our ability to adapt and learn new behaviors and thus make medicine one of the most challenging yet interesting fields. Can you imagine if medicine is all rote learning, entirely algorithmic, and all diseases present the same (all hoof beats are horses and never zebras)?
*This post has been published on Medscape's "Differential Blog."