Debugging the doctor brain

https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/debugging-the-doctor-brain

This article's particularly special to me, as my wife is an ER physician who teaches Intro to Clinical Reasoning to medical students, and I'm a programmer, so very few articles have been written that are so close to what we talk about day to day.

A lot of the article comes down to this:

There seems to be a mass delusion in the sciences that someone—not you, but someone—must have, or at least should have already, taught a student the fundamentals by the time they get in front of you, so that you can focus on the interesting, juicy, complex conversations, presumably with the “smart” people who already get it, the smart people who can hack it. But most of the people who get it had to get it somewhere3—why shouldn’t that somewhere be with you?

The author argues that it is your responsibility, as a senior physician or programmer, to teach more junior practitioners when they have gaps in their education. Oftentimes we desire just to engage on a higher level as if the person already has the required knowledge, but it's not always possible, and it's not right to throw away the potential of those who don't have it.