The importance of failure

It’s easy to live with success. However, in the context of medicine, success can be dangerous because it makes us complacent and less self-critical.
 
It’s extremely important, yet incredibly difficult, to admit to our mistakes and try to learn from them. As a young doctor, you can’t risk being completely honest with yourself because a certain degree of blind self-confidence is necessary in order to keep doing your job and learning.
 
We hone our skills by making mistakes. However, they’re extremely hard to swallow. In fact, you develop something referred to in psychology as “cognitive dissonance” where you recognize two contradictory thoughts, and applied to decision-making the term is demonstrated when part of you knows that your choice was probably a mistake and part of you denies it.
 
There’s also an obligation to tell your colleagues about your errors so that they don’t make them. Consequently, there’s pain in being a physician and it’s even more painful if you’re a nice doctor.
 
Therefore, the art of medicine is finding a balance between compassion and creating distance in your relationships with patients. You have to be detached and scientific, yet caring and compassionate, but the more you care the more it hurts when things go wrong.
 
With practice, you get used to these challenges, but you still suffer and you still feel bad about it, especially when patients die. Somehow life goes on though.
 
If you don’t take on the difficult cases you won’t become a better physician. Eventually, you learn to live in a permanent state of slight anxiety.
 
Most doctors are young and healthy and don’t really understand what it’s like to be a sick patient in hospital. It’s often only when physicians become patients that they say, “I never realized what it was like.” Perhaps hospitals would be nicer places if more doctors had personal experiences with health and many of us should probably listen to our patients more.
 
We’re all frightened about losing our health and physicians know what can go wrong. With experience you become more philosophical and as you age you also become wiser. In fact, there’s a common saying in medicine, “It takes three months to learn how to do an operation, three years to learn when to do it and 30 years to learn when not to do it.”