No. 8 - There are only 3 ways to learn medicine
Tldr
The 3 common ways to learn medicine: don’t, rote and root.
Today’s very short article is going to riff on a theme of how to learn medicine quickly. To see my first article in this series then follow the link below:
How many ways to learn medicine are there? … Broadly speaking, there are 3.
1 - Don’t learn medicine.
It’s complicated. It is not intuitive. It is probabilistic and full of Latin. If you are an ordinary person then all you ever really need to know is this: eat a balanced diet, mostly vegetables, not too much processed or carb; do regular exercise but not too intensively; wash your hands regularly; wash wounds with clean water; take antibiotics when your doctor or nurses advises you too; keep your vaccines up to date and cross your fingers and hope you have good genes and good luck.
2 - Rote learn medicine.
To many medical students this is always the first step. Pick any medical subject, write down all the new words, new definitions and new drug names. Then make another list or a mind map or post-it notes or just hand write the same sentence over and over again.
It is labour intense and it does work … eventually!
However, if you only ever rote learn something then you can only ever apply the knowledge to the situation that you have learnt. If situation A then give drug B. This becomes an issue when the reality of medicine changes the sharp black and whites of medical textbooks into the grey reality.
3 - Root cause medicine.
This way of learning medicine is more difficult to start with but pays off very quickly. The goal of this style is not to memorise lists of enzymes, genes, bacterial genus and G-protein coupled receptors. The goal of this style is to think in flow diagrams and systems.
If you can roughly describe the system, then even if you can’t name all of the pieces you can still make an educated guess at how 2 pieces of a jigsaw will fit together.
If a patient tells you they are short of breath and have swollen legs, then you can use your knowledge of the cardiovascular system to work out that they might have heart failure causing peripheral and pulmonary oedema. Then you can ask about other parts of the system jigsaw to confirm or deny.
To some people this way of thinking comes easily, to others it is more difficult and some people never truly develop a systemic understanding of physiology and pathology. Some people don’t try.
My goal for the next three years
I have nearly 3 years of GP training to go until I am fully licensed and my goal for this year is to recap all of the i systems I learnt at medical school and try to simplify them down to the absolute bare essential bits that I need to remember to cover the majority of conditions that will present to me as a new GP. I know for a fact that I can’t rote learn all 60,000 conditions and 6000k drugs, so I know I have to learn some systems to make this easier.