On inspiration and creativity in medicine

Inspiration seems to be the theme of the month for me, so I thought I would share an inspirational moment with you. Below is a 20 minute speech by Ken Robinson, who, as I learned recently, is one of the best speakers you will ever hear. Although he talks about education in general and its relation to creativity, this talk got me thinking about premedical and medical education.

As we strive to achieve the highest GPAs, excel in every possible and impossible endeavor we undertake and maintain at least a semblance of human contact, many will take a safe path to success. We will take courses we know will yield us the highest return for our investment. We will choose to study instead of seeing are friends. We will stay on the beaten path; that means that people in sciences will be reticent to take arts classes and vice versa. There is, however, a drawback to such strategies. Even though they undeniably give us a shot at actually getting accepted into medical school, they strip us of our potential for creativity. And for most of us, medical school will not be the place where it would start to develop, rather a place where it would completely die off unless it was exercised previously. With the habits of studying till exhaustion, being in the top 10%, feeling like any exam is too easy, - all these attitudes transported into medical school create an enormous potential for burnout and a definitive creativity killer. In order to maintain and develop your creativity, you have to be both critical and curious. Challenge authority. Always ask yourself 'why?' about anything and everything. Never settle for 'that is just the way it is' or tell yourself 'it will become clear later, when I really need to think about it'.

Another interesting point is most medical schools have rigorous structure in the curriculum. Understandably so, they have to pass the accreditation in order to grant MD dipomas in Canada, and a structured curriculum is a definite prerequisite for a passing grade. However, by using the traditional 2+2 (preclinical/clinical years) and the organ systems overview approach these schools divide something that occurs simultaneously within one minute in the brain of a staff physician into 24 months of class, labs, interactive presentations, didactic lectures, patient testimonies, hospital visits and maybe some situational simulations. Is that an oversimplification or is it just right? If everyone else who graduated previously practice now and have no apparent problems, should we content ourselves with that much, or, perhaps, that little? I know I did not mention the small groups. I did so intentionally, because I want to discuss the whole problem based learning in another post, going over all the pros and cons. My point was only to show you that it is easier to think of congestive heart failure complicated by pulmonary edema when you are learning about the cardiovascular system. How about when it is a 55 year old lady who is delivered into your emergency room because she has trouble breathing?