Hierarchies in Medicine

Despite my feminist background, I really do enjoy the hierarchy in medicine. Not because I think it’s helpful for anybody in the medical field, but because it makes sure there are checks and balances in patient care.

For example:

As a medical student, I have no idea what’s going on. Ever. In any given patient interaction, I will likely be the most confused person in the room. Even patient’s seem to know more about what’s going on then I do. But there’s a ton of reasons for this: my medical training is incomplete and, most likely, I’ve only worked at this hospital for a couple of weeks and I couldn’t find the nearest restroom or wherever they store tourniquets if I was offered enough money to cover my student loans.

But I’m not an idiot. I can catch errors. Very rarely I get to catch huge, major errors simply because I am the least busy person on the team. Like forgetting to order furosemide for the acute exacerbation of congestive heart failure patient. Really, it’s just an oversight. But I caught it and it changed management.

Doctors and residents are sometimes upset with me for not doing something or being “incompetent”, but it doesn’t matter, because I have an excuse: I’m an incompetent student. Whenever people give me criticism, it’s always in the form of, “One day, when you’re a resident/physician, you’ll be expected to…” which means that I’m not really expected to do much more than what I’m currently doing.