Becoming Tomorrow’s Doctor: A Guidebook on the Practice and Future of Medicine
About Becoming Tomorrow’s Doctor
by Christopher M. Cirino, DO, MPH
1. The doctor-patient relationship is a vital foundation for optimal medical practice. It is a partnership between a skilled and ever-learning decision-maker and someone seeking a connection to better understand their concern.
2. Our senses and mental short-cuts shape our ability to define the world around us and a paradigm of health through history. Future doctors must forge a path toward embracing their bias, a natural mechanism the brain uses to explain the world, tempering it with awareness and collaboration. Most medical errors occur from faulty synthesis rather than a lack of knowledge. In an ever-expanding field, medical schools must prepare a future doctor to decide better.
3. Technology has been the impetus to radical changes in our understanding of health. New technology extends the reach of our brains with tools, beginning with devices like the microscope, a specialized lens, to an unseen world. These enhance the senses, promote a more precise understanding of phenomena, and facilitate diagnosis and treatment. Technology will allow scientists to view observations more holistically as we delve deeper into the molecular underpinnings of how the environment shapes behavior and how behavior causes disease. The modern biological paradigm and pharma haven’t addressed these crises.
Technology will continue to inform us how to diagnose, treat, and restore optimal health. However, it has shaped doctors’ practice, resulting in burnout, patient errors, and dissatisfaction. Tomorrow’s doctors must not abandon the trusted toolkit of a solid interpersonal relationship, empathy, and collaboration between doctor and patient – one that enhances care and offers healing to both doctor and patient.
Becoming Tomorrow’s Doctor is a book written for future doctors and other health field students like nurses, PAs, nurse practitioners, or therapists. It is also helpful for anyone curious, whether patient or learner. Stay tuned for additional updates.
