How to be a lifelong learner
Definitions & Key takeaways
Medicine is a highly evolving science, and medical research regularly comes up with new knowledge and discoveries. As a healthcare provider, you must keep up with discoveries, updated protocols, and clinical guidelines so that you can provide optimal, safe, and up-to-date care to your clients. A few tips for becoming a good lifelong learner include making learning a habit and easy to do as much as possible. The second tip to becoming a lifelong learner is to trust but always verify your knowledge. Developing a habit of regularly verifying helps to check if anything has changed in the clinical guidelines or if you have been doing it correctly all the time. Finally, look for and fill your knowledge gaps, and be open to new ideas and perspectives.
All right. How are you feeling today?
Hi, I'm Sean Tackett, a general internist at Johns Medical Center and the research director for Osmosis. Um, today I wanna talk to you about three tips for being an excellent lifelong learner.
Uh, before I get to the tips, I do want to talk to you about why it's important to be a lifelong learner in the old days.
It was not important to be a life long learner. You could read the same book, people were reading Hippocrates for literally thousands of years.
Uh, today, there's just so much knowledge that it's actually completely impossible to keep up. So one fact is that pubmed last year published 5 million original research articles.
If you were to read every one of those articles, you would have to read one article every six seconds and not sleep for the duration of the year.
So it's completely impossible to keep up with everything. But you still have to try because on the flip side studies show that the longer a doctor is out in practice, the worse their performance becomes.
Uh, and many think that's because they haven't kept up with their knowledge and are not providing optimal care to patients.
Uh that is the most up to date with that three tips for being a lifelong learner tip. One make learning habit, you have to work it in your system.
It has to be as natural as waking up in the morning, brushing your teeth, putting on your clothes. Uh you have to make it easy.
Uh and so to make it easy, you have to develop a a system that you can sustain over time. So one system that comes to mind was with a doctor Johns Hopkins that I knew who was kind of old school, kept a notebook.
And so he tried to just keep up the tempo of writing one thing that he learned from a patient per day in his notebook. And so he learned one new thing every day and he did that over time and over time, he became uh sort of a genius physician.
So II remember pretty vividly from my residency, a patient who came in with iron deficiency anemia into the hospital. Um and we did AAA very thorough work up that included an endoscopy, a colonoscopy.
We did a small bowel follow through to look at uh with the capsule endoscopy and, and we couldn't find any source for why he was losing blood and and causing an iron deficiency anemia.
About six months later, that same patient returned to the hospital and uh and at that point, he did have a visible mass in his colon.
So, was diagnosed with colon cancer and was able to receive the treatment. And II actually saw him after that too where he was getting his treatment and to, and to see that evolution and uh one, it helped me realize the limitations of our testing because, you know, we did all the right tests, but we didn't discover uh the cancer that he probably had at that point.
Um But then too, you know, I also just got to see him and, and sort of his own experience in dealing with the disease over time.
So keeping a patient log is not a good idea, but uh no one final thing for, for tip one is uh to, you know, to keep your knowledge base regular, it helps to uh have something that's less effortful.
So II set up emails that come to my inbox from journals and from uh medicine digest that sort of, you know, so, so these things get pushed to me so that I just read them and, and in that way, it helps me keep up to date.
I mean, it'd be much harder if I was going to rely on myself to, you know, sit every Sunday afternoon and open up a textbook or read the latest journal.
So by having things sort of automated, they come to me, I think that's another way to make learning a, a habit. So to, to the, the term I'm giving this is trust, but verify, I trust myself and I trust the learning that I've had and I trust, you know, the experience that I've had.
Um, but I'm constantly fact checking myself and, and so I fact checked myself against the literature. I've looked up the pneumonia antibiotic guidelines, uh about once a month for the last six years or so.
Um Just because I'm always afraid that they've changed and that I'm not going to provide like the right treatment for my patients.
I trust my colleagues, but I like to double check them against what I read in the literature. And then you can only get so far with the literature because there is still an art to medicine and we don't know everything from scientific studies.
And so, um, so sort of triangulating between my own experience, my colleagues, uh what I read, uh I'm able to form a well-rounded opinion and make good decisions.
Um And it also uh through learning through patient care, I'm uh I'm building my knowledge base and becoming a better lifelong learner.
So tip three is look for your blind spots so we all have blind spots. There are things that we don't know, that we don't know.
And, and so you need to find ways to find, see those blind spots. So uh for your knowledge, blind spots, the emails and quizzes uh are, are help and doing a lot of questions is helpful for the other blind spots that may exist because there's a lot more to being a physician and just having a knowledge base, you know, you need to be an excellent communicator.
Um You need to be present when you're with patients, you need to be professional in your actions with colleagues and others.
Uh It, I think it really helps to have uh somebody observe what you're doing in real time and uh it's extremely uncomfortable to have somebody look over your shoulder and just watch you do your job, especially when you, you know, you maybe you think you've gotten good at it over time.
But, but it's also extremely helpful because when you sit down, you realize that they see things that probably other people are seeing but have not brought to your attention.
And then you can um you know, discuss those with them and get some advice and just that the awareness of how other people perceive you and or how, what other people were seeing when, when um when you're doing your job, I think is extremely helpful.
And because then you come up with a plan to, to improve the three tips. One learning has to be a habit, do a little bit every day, two trust but verify fact check all the time.
Three look for your blind spots, uh especially having an an observer, helps with that. So thank you.
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