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Do Doctors Feel That They Need Permission To Share Ideas?

Let’s say you’re a doctor and you have an idea, opinion, or a new way of doing things.  What do you do with it?

It used to be that the only place we could share ideas was in a medical journal or from the podium of a national meeting.  Both require that your idea pass through someone’s filter.  As physicians we’ve been raised to seek approval before approaching the microphone.

This is unfortunate.  When I think about the doctors around me, I think about the remarkable mindshare that exists.  Each is unique in the way they think.  Each sees disease and the human condition differently.  But for many their brilliance and wisdom is stored away deep inside.  They are human silos of unique experience and perspective.  They are of a generation when someone else decided if their ideas were worthy of discussion.  They are of a generation when it was understood that few ideas are worthy of discussion.  They are the medical generation of information isolation.

I spoke with a couple of students recently about Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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