On Learning
The best time of your life to make mistakes is during your training. I never understood in the past how on earth the adage: "the best way to learn is from your mistakes" came from. I always had the notion that if you knew the right thing to do, you would do it, plain and simple. The plain and simple truth, though, is, we don't always know the right thing to do OR we do not know how to do the right thing the right way. Learning from one's mistakes is both inevitable and effective.
Learning from mistakes is inevitable because we are not perfect people. We do not have perfect knowledge of the task at hand or in the ideal approach to things. we will always need our experience to guide us. And with lack of that experience to show what works and what doesn't work, we make decisions that may be right or may be wrong. When they are right, well and good. We achieve our objective. But when they are wrong, there are unpleasant consequences. In medicine, these unpleasant consequences may range from death of the patient to simple inconvenience of another, to poor compliance. Doctor patient interactions are not perfect because no one person has figured out the perfect way to approach a task.
Experience gives us basis for our conclusions. Humans are always looking for the reasons why things happen the way they do. There is no means to do this except by the faculties we already have: our senses. we rely on our eyes, ears, skin, mouths to tell us that some experience has truly occurred. In the same way, we rely on these resources to integrate that information. An action was done followed by a consequence, thus the logical thing is to conclude that the consequent experience was caused by the action. This is implied when people say: "eto kasi ang naranasan ko."Nobody can contest your experience because something did happen. Therefore, what does differ is the reasoning involved in comming up with the conclusion.
we all draw from our collective experience. It is difficult to believe what one has not experienced, therefore, we rely on the experiences of others. This is the reason we believe our mentors, or there are people "na naniniwala sa sabi sabi." Because with lack of our own experience, we have to find an explanation for the phenomena we experience in the world
As we learn in the ER, we see the outcome of our treatment decisions. We are able to break them down step by step and see clinical resolution in our patient. This is the reason consultants and seniors seem more confident in their treatment decisions whether or not they are right or wrong. They are confident because they have seen the phenomenon at work multiple times before and can almost safely predict the outcome. This is why experience is a very important factor in the learning of a medical student. They say learning does not come from books because it is only by doing that the task becomes relevant for you.
When we make mistakes, we see the unpleasant consequences of our actions, this causes distress and unpleasant stimulus to our psyche, and therefore, we take action in order to avoid that unpleasant stimulus. Training in Medicine is like macro-scale cognitive behavioral therapy. We learn how to prevent death and progression of illness in the patient. We learn how to use the knowledge we acquired to achieve our objective which is to improve our patient's quality of life.
That is the purpose of training: to show us right and wrong. This is the reason why we have experts and novices. Because the vast experience of human life cannot be fathomed simply by thinking. It must be experienced.