Aaron Hartman, MD, reflects on why doctors must keep learning. A patient had seen 17 clinicians for the same problem before finding help, illustrating how persistence and expanding your toolkit matters in medicine.
Chapters
We're never going to know everything. We have to consummately learn and relearn and expand and try and it's just great. And all along the process we get the benefit of the reward of patients healing and getting better where they went somewhere else and maybe they didn't get that or they went 16 other places. I just had a new intake and she said 17 and I said 18 and I was waiting for her to say 19 and she said, no, no, no, you're number 17, the 17th clinician I'm seeing for this problem. And I was just like, huh, no pressure, no pressure. She's doing great. And, and so it's kind of crazy that someone has to see 16 different doctors before they start to, to feel better. And I'm not saying that I can fix every problem, nor are you, but we are willing to try harder than most and, and have more tools at our fingertips.