Balancing Between Hubris and Despair

Dr. Robert Centor has an important post about hubris. It’s not a long post, if you want to click through and quickly read it. It’s about the danger of overweening pride and overconfidence that can come from blindly believing the praise that is often heaped upon us by those in our care. Essentially Dr. Bob is saying that we must avoid believing all the wonderful things our patients say to us. One the one hand, I agree completely. Pride indeed goeth before a fall, and in our line of work, the pain of our falls is literally felt by others. The line between the confidence we need in order to do what we have to do, and over-confidence that leads to potentially fatal errors of judgment is painfully narrow. All too easy to slip over without even realizing; the only safeguard is constant vigilance. There’s a phenomenon known as the Imposter Syndrome that affects basically everyone early in medical training (and many other endeavors as well.) It occurs when someone tells you how smart you are, or what a good doctor you are, and you think, “Geez, I really have them fooled. They have no idea that I haven’t a clue about what I’m doing.” Although this feeling gradually (oh so gradually) abates over years (and decades) in practice, I’ve always felt that hanging onto at least a shred of it functions as a bit of a “hubris safety net.” Being able to honestly say to oneself, “It’s nice to hear that, but I’m really no...
Source: Musings of a Dinosaur - Category: Primary Care Authors: Tags: Medical Source Type: blogs