Doctor, You Can Be Less Error Prone Right Now
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Abstract
The Problem:
From moment to moment, while tending their patients, physicians can slip from: patience to impatience; genuine enquiry to assumptions; attention to the task-at-hand to inattention; certain doubt to doubtful certainty; and from doing what is inconvenient to doing what is convenient. In summary, one can slip from neo-cortex to archi-cortex (reptilian brain) emphasis. (The hazardous attitudes associated with aviation and medical mishaps are reptilian in character). This is expressed: to err is human, the reptilian part.
Objectives: Therefore, to improve decisions, one needs to reclaim the new-brain emphasis, the advocate for the patient’s interests.
Method: To be aware which emphasis one commands, ask oneself a few reptilian-revealing questions. Then counter the reptilian attitude by specific and or generic antidotes to be less error prone.
Conclusion: Doctors should realize that there is also another patient one is tending: the patient called oneself, whose symptoms are haste, egoism and apathy and whose diagnosis is the reptilian brain. While this lesion is inoperable and the prognosis is guarded, yet amid the uncertainty and demands of our medical tending, one can toggle back to patience and doing the inconvenient to reach after fact and reason.
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