"I don't know"
Yesterday I attended the opening session of the annual Mini Medical School at [Teaching hospital]. I was very impressed. 400 people registered this year and there were 50 on the waiting list! Yesterday's session consisted of a welcome speech by the Dean of the College of Medicine. I didn't realise how big our medicine program is until he told us that 16% of US medical school applications are sent to our University's medical program. The Dean's speech was followed by two lectures on neurology - one on Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS) and the other on ALS (more commonly known in the US as Lou Gehrig's disease). I found the lectures fascinating, especially since I realised that I have RLS. I have experienced the symptoms of RLS since childhood, though they have decreased a lot with age, and I did not know that those sensations were associated with an actual neurological disorder. Also, it struck me that in the case of both RLS and ALS, scientists have not found out the exact causes of these diseases. Lou Gehrig's disease is not curable and patients, on average, die within 2-3 years of discovering that they have the disease. And they are still trying to figure out what exactly causes RLS.
There was a question-answer session after both lectures, and for a lot of questions asked by the audience, the emminent doctors answered quite frankly, "I don't know" or "We don't know, but we think it might be ....". And I realised that medicine is probably the only profession when you can be an expert in your field of study and yet be able to stand in front of a room full of people and answer "I don't know" to questions about the problem you have spent your life studying. When I am done with my PhD and presenting my talk to an audience, it will be completely unacceptable for me to reply "I don't know" to any question about my area of research. I will be expected to know everything about the problem I have spent the last 4-5 years studying. But the human body is different. Seeing those emminent doctors say "I don't know" made me realise how complex the human body is and how ambitious the goals of medicine are. Man might never figure out the complete mechanism of how the body functions and why, in some cases, it doesn't function as it should. It must be very humbling to work in the medical field.
There was a question-answer session after both lectures, and for a lot of questions asked by the audience, the emminent doctors answered quite frankly, "I don't know" or "We don't know, but we think it might be ....". And I realised that medicine is probably the only profession when you can be an expert in your field of study and yet be able to stand in front of a room full of people and answer "I don't know" to questions about the problem you have spent your life studying. When I am done with my PhD and presenting my talk to an audience, it will be completely unacceptable for me to reply "I don't know" to any question about my area of research. I will be expected to know everything about the problem I have spent the last 4-5 years studying. But the human body is different. Seeing those emminent doctors say "I don't know" made me realise how complex the human body is and how ambitious the goals of medicine are. Man might never figure out the complete mechanism of how the body functions and why, in some cases, it doesn't function as it should. It must be very humbling to work in the medical field.
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