If I were to quickly ask everyone how perfect or precise they believe a doctor or other medical professional is with everything they do, I am sure many would answer “100% perfect.” Brian Goldman, a physician himself, discusses in his TedTalk Doctors make mistakes. Can we talk about that? that this perception of doctors and medical field workers is not true. He owns up to some of his mistakes during his time as a physician in this talk and makes it clear that as long as the medical field is run by humans, it will never be perfect. I would describe Goldman’s speech as one which takes a look into the side of medicine that no one wants to talk or think about: the mistakes: the mistakes made by individuals regarded as the brightest and most brilliant in our world today.
We can’t approve of mistakes or faulty medicine, but we must accept it and learn from the mistakes that are made.
Batting Average
Goldman makes reference to batting average which personally appealed to me as a baseball player. He questioned the audience how high they thought doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals batting average is. By batting average, I garnered that he was referring to success rate on procedures. He imposes the fact that everyone expects doctors to be perfect and bat 1.000 as a professional who is practicing on injured or sick patients. And I couldn’t agree more with him in the fact that no matter how hard we try, mistakes will be made. I know many might not agree, but in no way is it reasonable to expect doctors, nurses, and other specialists to be perfect with every procedure, diagnosis, or maneuver that they take on. Now I am sure that if I were to ask any medical professional if they strive to be perfect or wish to be perfect that their answer would be nothing short of a strong “yes.” They are here to take care of all of us and the professionals I have shadowed so far in my early career take patients’ lives and well-being serious.
Understanding What You’re Working With
Following his analogy about batting average, Goldman was able to provide us with some of his biggest blunders as a practicing professional. He made sure to include that medical professionals can never look at patients the same. This was something that really stood out to me. We are always expected to go out look for symptoms, identify markers, and treat accordingly. This is unrealistic. As Goldman explained, no two patients are the same, no two patients describe what they have going on the same, and no two patients will ever react to a treatment the same exact way. When he said that, it put things into perspective for me. How can we strive to practice medicine perfectly when our patients can differ so much from one to the other. We can go by what the book says but that can only take us so far since everyone is different.
Learning From Experience
To finish out his talk, Goldman wanted to end on a positive note. He went on about how important it is to learn from what we do, the things we do right, and the mistakes we make. He made sure to reiterate that no one is ever perfect in anything they do. He said that we should be striving to learn something everyday, it doesn’t have to be a lot but just one thing. I think that was such a strong way to finish off. By learning one thing from one patient and applying it to another case, we could find success. Mistakes aren’t complete failure if we learn from what was done or what happened. We can’t approve of mistakes or faulty medicine, but we must accept it and learn from the mistake that are made.
Ultimately, I think that it is important that we understand our doctors are humans and until they get replaced by machines, which I don’t foresee happening anytime soon, we can’t expect perfection. We can keep learning and keep inching ourselves towards the perfect medical world but I can assure, and I am sure Dr. Goldman could too, we are still so far away from that.
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