If you are a physician, then don’t be obedient and question everything. It sounds trivial, yet it’s incredibly hard to accomplish in medicine. From our first days in med school to our residency at hospitals, we are taught, that science and the head of department is always right. Whereas the former should be true for the most part, the latter is hardly ever true. I once heard what EBM really means: Eminence-based-medicine.
Now that’s bad for multiple reasons. On the one hand the eminence rarely practices medicine that is backed by RCTs and research and on the other hand it takes away responsibility and out-of-the-box thinking from you, the physician. Obviously there are also good reasons for being obedient. If you compare medicine with the airline industry (which we did), then the right balance between obedience and disobedience is crucial whether a plane crashes or not. For my feeling, this balance is not right at the moment in medicine.
Physicians should be less obedient, more questioning, more suspicious and less of a believer in what we have been taught to believe in. This results in better and happier physicians.
