Good Medicine

I had some good medicine for my anxiety today; General Medicine to be more specific ;) I went to Dr Cline's clinic today and followed him around. It helped me to take my mind off the whole traveling issue. It was great to see a general practioner in Nachodoches in action. He has Physician's Assistances and nurses that help him out so the clinic is able to get through a lot of patients dispite having only 1 doctor present.

It was 10 times more interesting than my perclinical years. The time went by so quickly and I managed to understand pretty much all of it which was great. My reading speed also managed to increase drastically. I guess that I wasn't really challenged in med school to read at a quick pace.

We came across a couple of patients that "knew better than Dr Cline". It was amusing to hear what these patients had to say. I could understand how they came to their conclusion given what they looked up and the resources they used. However, luckily for them, Dr Cline is a DOCTOR and has more advanced resources up his sleeve. He handled it very well. He listened and allowed them to say what they wanted to say. He then acknowledged that he had heard and took their suggestion into account. the patients were wrong but we both could still respect their suggestion.

I've had the opposite thing happened to me once. I went to the doctors and self diagnosed myself (as subtly as I could). She preceded to reason with me and say why I was wrong (she thought I had med student syndrome). She told me about my body and reasons for certain things. I said that I knew my body and that we should go ahead with tests. She said that I should wait it out and to go back in 2 months if the symptoms didn't go away. I went back in 2 weeks. She relunctantly ordered the tests that I wanted. Surely enough, I was right! Ok, so it wasn't a life or death situation. And yes, I was slightly paranoid and she had good reason to doubt. However, I did get immense satisfaction from finding out that I was right when originally I was told that I paranoid.