August 08, 2013

Renewal and Reflections.

So it's about time for me to restart this blog again.

I made several meager attempts in medical school and residency, but I was always meek about posting patient related information and I was always pressed for time and drained of energy.

However, I'm moving into a new period of my life (and a new period of the blogosphere where it is going the way of the dinosaur and may actually have more intimate readership!... i.e. just me.)

I'm starting up a master teacher fellowship in medical education and we wrote a reflection in our "blogs" on a website and I figured, hey, this is good enough that I'll save it for my own site as well.


            Before I started medical school, I was interested in being a teacher or a scientist.  I loved analysing, studying and sharing what I learned with others.  As I went through college and learned more about the differing opportunities that a physician has available, I realized that I did not have to these give up while working as a physician!   The concept of “how doctors think” is highly prized by learners and I want to work on ways to provide this early on in medical school/residency curriculum.  Research on this subject by Croskerry (2009) and Gigerenzer (2011) has inspired me to be more self-aware of this process.  I plan to implement what I learn with the University of Dundee coursework to help create a framework for the development of clinical judgement and to instill a sense of effective lifelong learning in those I work with and those I teach. I am a little worried that the expected length of completion for the masters program is 3-5 years.  This is the main reason why I want to keep my end-goals in mind and find ways to always apply my knowledge towards my thesis.

CROSKERRY, P. (2009). A Universal Model of Diagnostic Reasoning. Academic Medicine. 84 (8), 1022-1028.

GIGERENZER, G. and GAISSMAIER, W. (2011). Heuristic Decision Making.  Annu. Rev. Psychol. 62:451-482.