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by ghufran_syed
3316 days ago
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Some of the best advice I ever read on this subject, which really helped me through residency training was from the little essays at the beginning of the Oxford handbook of clinical medicine [1]. The one I particularly remember was called "On being busy", and taught a generation of UK medical students and residents about "Corrigan's secret door" (the link hopefully shows that page on Google books). My favorite quote from the book was about how to recognise "stress" in yourself: "stress is defined as arguing with more than one nurse in 24 hours". The book was affectionately known in England as the "cheese and onion book", because the colour of the cover matched what at the time was the traditional colour of packets of cheese and onion flavor crisps in the UK [2] [1] https://goo.gl/6Pz1Z1 [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2293465/A-che... |
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I sometimes ponder, against my own experience from experiencing the mathematical side of things, how the "folklore" wisdom in the medical community is almost certainly something that the rest of us might benefit from (this probably started when I read The Emperor of All Maladies a couple years back) considering the issues that the mental part of it deals with: ethics, conduct in a power-unequal relationship, consent, the moral imperative to evaluate risk competently (and the recognition that the former can never be done perfectly), telling the truth and intention/effect differences ("you're almost certainly going to die"/"this is a miracle!"), not to mention the elephant-in-the-room question of living with death as a close acquaintance and learning not to become consumed with either anger or despair at what one considers personal failings.
(I suppose the late Oliver Sacks's work is an instance of what I'm talking about.)