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Record W3008627722 · doi:10.1097/acm.0000000000003228

A Stitch in Time: Embracing My Limits as a Medical Learner

2020· letter· en· W3008627722 on OpenAlexaffabout
Jeffrey Lam Shin Cheung

Bibliographic record

VenueAcademic Medicine · 2020
Typeletter
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicInnovations in Medical Education
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHonestyPerfectionMedicineFeelingPrideMedical educationPsychologyLawSocial psychologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

To the Editor: Many believe that physicians are perfect, all-knowing beings. Despite having heard about clinical errors through news media, I also subscribed to this belief, and, consequently, carried a philosophy of perfection into my first clinical observership as a medical student. The physician I shadowed, a family doctor operating in a rural community, occasionally asked me about the patients’ cases, and I felt accomplished when responding correctly to the questions she fired. Then, she threw a curve ball. The next patient was a child who cut his leg, and the physician enthusiastically prompted me to suture the wound. For some, suturing a one-inch cut might be banal. For me, it was daunting. In all my three weeks of medical school, I had not yet learned about suturing. I was clueless, yet refusing seemed unviable. The family physician continued pointing the needle driver toward me, repeating that it was an easy procedure, something that I should know how to do. As I reached for the needle driver, I looked to the boy, finally noticing his terrified expression. I was so preoccupied with my own thoughts that I had neglected the patient. He deserved my honesty. He deserved quality care. My throat unfroze, and the words finally flowed: “I don’t feel comfortable doing the sutures. I’ve never done it before … but I would appreciate if I could watch how you would do this.” I waited for the physician’s reply. How incompetent are you? Are you really a medical student? You should know this already! You should consider another profession! I braced myself for the harsh criticism, but it never came. Instead, the physician apologized for assuming that I was comfortable with treating the patient and started explaining what to do. This was my first instance (of many) of admitting my inability to perform a task. Despite the family physician’s understanding words, I felt frustrated and embarrassed. However, it was these emotions that ultimately prompted me to improve my knowledge. Later that week, I began watching YouTube video tutorials on suturing techniques, and I registered for an upcoming surgical skills workshop. I believe that physicians have an innate desire to seek perfection, but no one is born knowing how to perform a cardiac exam or how take a social history. We all need first experiences to learn and grow, and admitting our limitations is essential for discovering our starting points. Jeffrey Lam Shin CheungFirst-year medical student, University of Toronto Medical School, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; [email protected]

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.012
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.140
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.022
Threshold uncertainty score0.065

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0120.140
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0090.009
Scholarly communication0.0160.023
Open science0.0040.008
Research integrity0.0220.040
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0120.005

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.036
GPT teacher head0.367
Teacher spread0.332 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2020
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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