August 7, 2009

• So are you a Doc, or what?

  Daily, I find myself explaining who I am to patients. Who is this young, inexperienced, charming, excessively thorough, very slow-to-get-things-done but has-a-lot-of-time-to listen person standing before them? I’m a Resident Physician

  Many residents work longer hours than their attending (supervising) physicians, so you may find us at all hours of the night, roaming the hospital corridors on our way to assess a new patient or with our pager beeping incessantly, warning us that we’d better run to Tele for that “Code Blue” or that someone needs our help in the Emergency Room. On Scrubs, resident interns are bleary-eyed, sarcastic, self-doubting, dependent and righteous creatures. On Grey’s Anatomy, we are ethics-violating, emotional hardcore nymphomaniacs who get lunch breaks at lunchtime (as if!). On House, we are not present…he works with Fellows. But what are we really?

  A resident physician is  a person who holds an MD but who has not yet completed qualification requirements We need to have a certain amount of hands-on technical and patient experience as well as passing written and situational qualifying exams. Fully licenced physicians supervise us at all times. Depending on the speciality, residents will do 2 to 6+ years of training in addition to their medical school and undergraduate work.

  Generally we have, in our medical school years, seen patients of all kinds, but we lack the experience to make the judgement calls that seasoned doctors are able to. Likewise, we may have never met someone with a certain condition, though we’ve probably read about it in a textbook. The problem is, the diseases don’t read the textbook. Rashes never look the same as they are supposed to. Lab values often don’t correspond to what we would expect in the case of such-and-such disease. But developing heuristics, pattern recognition, and a collection of experience is exactly what we are working at. And we are profoundly trained in how to find the answer to a problem and knowing when to ask for help.

  Hopefully that clears up any confusion you may have had. And welcome new readers…You picked a great time to visit, as I have been on hiatus for a while and much like you, have only recently come to the site

  • 7:33 am
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