Can a slow learner become a good doctor? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Maureen Boehm, former Internal Medicine Physician, on Quora: Can a slow learner become a good doctor? I can only answer from the perspective of a physician that was educated and trained in the U.S. Please know that I hate to ever be anything other than encouraging. The problem is not being a good doctor. If you are bright, hardworking and compassionate you will be a great doctor. The problem is jumping through the myriad of hoops that go along with our education and training. Medical school and residency are brutal. You have to learn and assimilate huge amounts of information very quickly. If you can’t keep up, you will be unceremoniously dumped. Your workload as a practicing physician is quite high. You have to learn about your patient. You must review vitals, labs, imaging, pathology, op reports, exams, and specialist input. You have to integrate this information, apply your medical knowledge, and seek to fill in any knowledge gaps rapidly. Now you have to take all of this information and come up with a list of possible diagnoses and a cohesive plan. Oh, by the way, you have to do this for twenty patients, almost simultaneously. Nurses are lining up for urgent matters. You are constantly interrupted by family members, the lab, Radiology, and emergencies. You may have been on your feet fueled by caffeine for thirty hours. Further, if you screw it up, someone might die. So while you may have the qualities that make a good doctor, the pace of the training and work might make it impractical for you. That’s just my experience. Feel free to prove me wrong. Peace. Source
I agree that if you fall behind you will have a very hard time to get back on track. There is no time to recover from even the slightest stumble. I do not agree that that makes you a poor doctor. The medical profession has gotten into the mentality that the series of board tests define “good doctor”. Do you need to know the basic sciences, absolutely! The key is that you need to know them, not memorized simply to be forgotten and you need to know what is applicable to your patients, today, in the present. There is no point in learning the ins and outs of drugs that we no longer prescribe, or can not prescribe just because they make for “good” board questions. How many board questions today involve warfarin in some way? Will they still be on the boards after apixaban goes generic? Let’s hope not. Nor is it important to learns the ins and outs of conditions that have limited exposure (why learn about a porphorane condition that has had only 12 cases reported in the last century? Yes, it is in the books, and on practice exams but don’t we have enough to learn?) Good board scores do not necessarily make good doctors, you might be but it is no guarantee. It means your have memorized the mountain of material and are an effecient test taker. In boards if you read the answers first and then the question and then if you need to scan the stem you are a test taker. If you start at the top and try to diagnose the patient as you read through the stem, you are a doctor. As for making a mistake and people die, yes. Find a doctor who in their heart does not think they could have made a better decision on a case, no matter what their board score was. But I will say this. Better that you did not score highest on boards but you understand !why! Something works than just memorizing that drug x goes with condition y. Because at 3:00am on your 4th code of the night and you’ve already pulled a 30 hr shift, pure memory will fail you and you will call for amlodipine instead of amioderone.
