“I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. “Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death”
– Leonardo da Vinci
This side of the New Year, especially since I’m on the final leg of my Med School journey, I’ve been getting a bit reflective about the past few years. I’ve especially been thinking about one of the courses called PECH (Professionalism, Ethics and Communication in Health), which we had to take in our first 2 years in addition to our medical courses.
The purpose of the course was to train us to become “well-rounded doctors”– not just some jaded automatons treating diseases instead of treating the actual human patient.
At the time, I did more than my fair share of complaining about the additional work I had to do for this course, but now that I’ve spent the past two years in the hospital interacting with patients, I can appreciate the importance of such a course. I think anyone who’s ever stepped into a hospital has had at least a few instances when they’ve had to deal with a medical professional who really wasn’t very professional at all. And working in the system, I’ve seen doctors at both ends of the spectrum — some impatient and snappy, and others endlessly patient and caring. For the most part, I’ve worked with doctors who fall somewhere in-between, just people trying their best to do their jobs the best they could.
There were a few takeaways from those PECH courses that proved to be useful even outside of a medical setting.
First of all, there’s the notion of integrating work and action with the acquiring of knowledge itself — all within an ethical framework. I come from a tradition that insists that information isn’t knowledge when one hears it, or even cogitates upon it and integrates it with other ideas. It becomes “knowledge” when it is put into action. And “informs” you. So PECH was not entirely a novel experiment.
In our first semester, a big portion of our assignments for PECH was to write a series of reflective essays. We were supposed to select news articles, videos, or even TV shows, reflect on what feelings they evoked, and then write down our thoughts on the matter. And it wasn’t that bad, except for the part where our tutors kept telling us that we needed to dig deeper and pour out more of our feelings into these essays, and it all felt like impromptu (and unwanted) psychiatric sessions. Kind of an extended Woody Allen movie.
But at least the course forced us to take the time to reflect on the things around us. In this current time, when the Internet is so accessible and there’s so much information accessible, so much information just filters through, doesn’t stick, and we don’t think much about all of this new information. At the time, a piece of new information might cause you to think, “Oh. That’s interesting.” You’d pause for a moment, and then you’d keep scrolling and move onto something new, and probably forget about that other thing. We don’t really process and internalize much of this information.
Of course, much of it isn’t really worth retaining. And this is where your ethical values come in handy: so that you have a framework — in addition to the purely “medical” or “scientific” rules — to evaluate information. I don’t think there’s a prize out there for remembering all of the details of celebrity marriages.
But some of it you should at least try to think about — how the issue might impact on you, on your life, and on the people around you. It’s nice to step out of your personal bubble and take a genuine interest in the things you read, hear, or see, instead of letting them pass you by.
So, slow down a bit in your incessant scrolling through information. Take some time to actually read though an article, and pass it through your ethical screen before commenting, instead of forming an opinion off of just a headline.
