You are now a medical doctor but people mistake you for a health doctor!

So, now you’re officially a practicing doc, a specialist! Do you get the exciting feeling that now you’ve mastered it all?   How much do you get excited about the compliments of your patients who believe that you’re the one who knows it all? 

Do you know why they value your opinions and prescriptions so much? Because they believe that you reign over the most precious body of knowledge in this world, the knowledge of medicine. But why is this body of knowledge so much valued by people? The answer is….. because it helps to restore their health! What they are confusing in this process is taking medicine for health, and health for medicine. The truth is that medicine is a means to achieving health and not the other way around. As such it is not surprising to find so many unhealthy physicians out there in the world. 

Let’s be candid for a moment, do you agree that the patients who believe you know-it-all are mistaken, don’t you? You may be able to fool everyone else, but you cannot fool yourself. The truth is that what you’ve really learned so far at the school has been related to medicine, whereas most of your patients mistakenly think of you as their health guru. 

Do you recall what you did during your specialty training years? Do you remember how relentlessly you used to work on a narrow discipline of the art and science of medicine? Do you truly believe that you have learned it all even within that narrow discipline? Let’s be truthful, you’ve only scratched the surface of that vast body of knowledge!  

Do you know when your first day of practicing real medicine truly begins? It’s when you doubt your knowledge and start feeling how much more is out there that you have to yet master!  Do you know who teaches you all your health-related lessons thereafter?  Your patients!

Here is something good to remember, good teachers learn from their students, and good doctors from their patients!