Hey friends, happy Sunday before Halloween! 👻
❓ Let's start with a question:
What is the best piece of advice you've received about working in medicine?
Back when I was a medical student on rotations 👶🏻, I received some wisdom from an anesthesiologist that really stuck with me:
"There's three ways to practice medicine: Slow and wrong, fast and wrong, or fast and right."
As a medical student interested in emergency medicine who was obsessed with efficiency, this made perfect sense ✅. To be successful as a physician you need to be quick 💨, otherwise you might get left behind or even worse, harm a patient because of your inefficiency 😕.
Recently though, I've really been challenging this advice 🤔. The emergency department has been as busy as ever, so keeping productivity up is critical 📈. Lately, I’ve realized that my biggest challenges haven’t come from working too slowly — they’ve come from moving too fast.
While there hasn't been any serious harm 😮💨, I've sometimes caught myself trying to push and see as many patients as possible, only to keep a previous patient waiting longer than I could have or to find myself buried in incomplete notes at the end of shift 😵💫. It really got me thinking about slow medicine 🛑.
Slow medicine is a movement aimed at encouraging physicians to slow down, be more attentive to the patient in front of us, and focus on quality rather than speed 😌.
Slow medicine has been around since the early 2000's, and several groups and even countries have formed societies to investigate it more 🔍. Slow medicine is not meant to clog up the healthcare system or overdiagnose patients 🩻, but rather it serves to bring the focus back to patient care in a world driven more and more by data and focused on short-term success 🙅🏻♀️.
Slow medicine isn't a cure-all for healthcare problems, but it does offer a healthier balance — one that strengthens the physician–patient relationship ⚖️ and fosters high-quality care 👍🏻. All of this has been a simple reminder for me to do one thing:
Slow down.
There will always be another patient to see or another task to do. Whether you're working in a chaotic emergency department 🚑, a busy medical office 🩺, or even outside of medicine entirely 👷🏾, concepts like slow medicine recenter our focus while improving our mood and performance.
As we creep into the winter months ❄️ and flu season when hospitals and doctor's offices typically see the largest number of patients 😷, I felt that it was important to share this reminder, both for myself and my wonderful subscribers ❤️.
And if you're a medical student, here's an extra reminder: Efficiency is not your job 🙈! Your job is to see patients, perform good evaluations, and learn the medicine 📚. Speed comes with time, and that's something the doctors that you work with can (and should!) teach you along the way.
So as we near the end of the year I’m reminding myself — and hopefully you — that medicine isn’t just about moving fast, but about moving with purpose.
📖 What I'm reading: The Little Book of Hygge – it's a laid back, cozy read on how to find happiness and through comfort and togetherness!
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