I can vividly remember my first day as a real doctor. I started on the pediatric pulmonology service, and recall spending what felt like an hour, deliberating whether I could order Tylenol for my patient. Would it interact with the Pulmozyme treatment? Fortunately, I had very patient senior resident who calmed my nerves and was empathetic to my intern anxiety. Summer is an exciting, terrifying, rewarding and sometimes frustrating season, as we celebrate a new “medical year.” Whether or not you subscribe to the controversial premise of the July effect, there is no doubt that during this time you can leave a pivotal educational footprint in the life and career of a young doctor.
As we lead these learners on this educational journey, one of the most poignant lessons we can teach them is how to think critically. This includes recognizing and managing cognitive biases. Pattern recognition, which primarily occurs unconsciously, and analytical thinking which is deliberate and conscious, are the principal means by which we make medical decisions. Cognitive biases are errors in reasoning that affect primarily the pattern recognition pathway. Debiasing strategies focus on transitioning from pattern recognition to a more analytic approach. By utilizing these debiasing strategies, we can reduce clinical errors committed by our learners and ourselves.
The first step in this process is to define and recognize the different type of cognitive errors that most commonly occur in medicine.
Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how.
