CURIOSITY//NO PRETENSE OF LINEAR THOUGHT//WHAT MAKES A GOOD STUDENT DOCTOR?

This is an interesting article suggesting that the best doctors are not the smartest or even the most "humane"... simply the most curious. It makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite things about medicine is that you are constantly learning. You have to keep taking CME courses to keep passing boards; you have to stay up to date with how disease management is changing so you can give your patients the best care; etcetera. Rosalind Franklin University's motto is specifically: "A Life in Discovery." You rarely make discoveries if you're not curious.

This was my favorite quote:

"Watching talks given by Nobel Prize winning scientists for inspiration, she noticed similarities in their ways of thinking. They all seemed to toss around ideas with no pretense of linear thought, no semblance of structure, and, perhaps most importantly – no pretense of competence."

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/2012/03/08/what-single-quality-predicts-a-good-doctor/

This also reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad about how we had both learned a lot more from our medicine rotations than our surgery ones (my dad even told the head of the surgery department at the Feinberg School of Medicine (Northwestern University) that he didn't want to go into surgery because "surgeons don't know as much as internists.") In surgery you were either right or wrong, you studied on your own time. In medicine you can still be right or wrong, but you can also be close to right but not quite there yet, we're not standing over an anesthetized body and we've got the time so we're going to teach you right here right now. I love that. I love that I can think out loud and not be told that I am wrong but rather be told that I am going to learn something today. 

Besides that one day I showed up on 4 hours of sleep and severely hungover from a friend's Oktoberfest, I have learned at least one fascinating thing every single day of my rotation.