Category: General Medicine

While you’ve got your head pressed against the pages of a behemoth textbook, trying to memorise the caspases of the extrinsic pathway of apoptosis, there’s a game being played around you.

And it’s a game that has nothing to do with good grades or medical skills…and everything to do with making you a cog in a broken machine designed to build someone else’s dream.

Pick your head up, look around and figure out what’s really going on.

206 bones in the body. A seemingly endless number of origins, insertions, innervations and actions to memorise and internalise. Oh, and a gazillion tests and assignments all due next week…In the midst of all sorts of dramas going on around you.

Here’s what you do.

Take and breath, and take it one bone at a time…”bird by bird” to quote Anne Lamott:

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said. ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'”

Don’t worry about how much you’ve got to do. Start where you are and do what you can. 

It’s going to be okay. Just take it bone by bone. 

What if you had to master 5 years of medical studies into one year…how would you do it?

Conventional wisdom says it takes 5 years to be a Doctor. But does it? 

Are those 5 years fully optimised where there isn’t a moment wasted?

Does it have to take so long? Should it take longer? Shorter?

What if we needed new Doctors every year instead of every 5?

How would we go about making that a reality? And what would those Doctors look like?

If you had to master 5 years of medical studies into one year…how would you do it?

Here’s a rule of thumb: Everybody is usually wrong.

Anytime you hear Everybody making an assertion, you can be sure that Everybody is making some assumptions that are waiting to be challenged.

Don’t accept the conventional wisdom of the masses. If Everybody is saying something is true/false, that’s a clear signal to explore the alternatives. 

Those moments where you feel like quitting, where you feel as if you’ve studied for 4 hours and can’t remember a single sentence…but you still find a way to take another step? 

That’s what makes you a Doctor.

This is a Marathon not a sprint.

Instead of trying to compete with each other,  try to compLete each other.

When you catch yourself thinking lack rather than abundance…add an “L” to change your framework and see what happens.