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Friday 15 March 2013

Why are medical students so boring



I was reading the news the other day and came across this article. The idea of a bunch of students sending a mobile phone into space is pretty cool. The problem with their experiment is that the speaker is not physically separated from the microphone so vibrations will be able to pass through the phone itself. If they truly wanted to test whether sound can be transmitted in space then the two components would have to be separated by a vacuum.




What has this got to do with medicine? Well actually the article itself has nothing to do with medicine, it is my thought process that I want to analyse. The problem with studying medicine is that you are taught to think critically. This is all well and good when taking a history from a patient because it helps you pick out the relevant points and put them together to make a diagnosis.

Unfortunately this also carries over into other areas of life where it is maybe not so well received.
It is a difficult skill that takes time to acquire. The problem is that once it is acquired it is difficult not to apply it in every day life. This usually doesn’t matter too much, but when you are reading the news or having a discussion with friends it can get in the way. It gets in the way when you are in shops or looking at adverts though, because you are always thinking why. Why is this product so cheap, why is the sales person trying harder to sell me this one, or what makes this product so much better than the others.

The upshot of this is that actually medics are difficult people to get along with. We often argue on small points and criticise where maybe we should just keep our mouths shut. So a slightly more philosophical post today and I suppose the take home message is that maybe we should be more aware of how we think because it could stop us from being overly pragmatic. 

1 comment:

  1. When you only see a patient once during a primary care rotation, it's easy to think that every visit is a boring medication adjustment. medical Autoclave

    ReplyDelete

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and will endeavour to get back to you