One of the most difficult things I encounter, as a doctor who is also a teacher, is the problem of how to teach young doctors. Residents in psychiatry, and my colleague physicians, need to learn. Medicine is a an ongoing learning experience, we all know. We even call it continuing medical education (CME) and we have licensing requirements about needing to attend CME lectures.
I tend to be one of the lecturers, but one of the hardest things for me, harder even, in many ways, than the actual work of treating patients, is to teach. I do not mean the mechanics of it: I am decent at public speaking; I know how to use powerpoint; I know the material for my lectures (research studies) quite well. The problem is: How do I bring new knowledge to others, who are actively engaged in the practice of psychiatry, or who are well on their way to it, while not taking away the knowledge they have? Men should be taught as if you taught them not, says an old poem. Is this possible?
Every new wisdom is a disillusion; all new knowledge removes prior false belief. And we do not like to be disillusioned; our old beliefs feel like old friends: we hate to see them go. And doctors, some of whom suffer the God syndrome, cling all the more tenaciously to their beliefs, false and true.
Who am I, and how am I, to tell them what is true and what is false? How can we teach?
Henry Adams, in the famous memoir about his education, concluded that one could never actually teach anything. Most education is accidental, he concluded, not formal. Another way of putting this is the old saying that learning by example is much more effective than learning by precept. Perhaps this is the wisdom behind the apprenticeship mode of medical education, the years of following around other doctors to see how they practice, not just to hear about it in lecture halls.
There is something to the being, and the seeing, that far outstrips the talking, and the hearing.
Maybe that is it: but there is still knowledge to be taught. So I will keep teaching, or thinking that I am teaching, and hopefully learning, or thinking that I am learning.
