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This type of relationship establishes the medical student as an important part of the healthcare team, beneficial to the overall care provided to the patient. For the medical student, it also establishes long-term behaviors that translate into the development of an excellent future physician. A few basic rules will help you to become a good clinician. During the third year, there may be conflicting responsibilities, such as being at a lecture while needing to draw a patient’s blood. In general, the priority should be the care of the patient. If it is an important blood test and you cannot get someone to do it for you, you may need to miss the lecture. These situations don’t actually come up that often, and if patient care is the main goal, over the long run, most people will respect these decisions. There are two kinds of physicians: those who read and those who don’t. Read about your patients’ conditions. You should read textbooks because they cover the basics, and 90 percent of people do not know what is in them. Articles are for later. It does not matter which textbook you read, because if the information is important, it will come up again in later reading. If the information is unimportant, it will not come up very often. So now you have four patients and you go home. You got up at 5:00 a.m. to make it to rounds. You get home at 7:00 p.m. after your last post-op note. After you have petted the dog and had something to eat, it is 8:30. You deserve a break, so you watch TV for an hour. You are ready to read, and recall from your notes that your patient has hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and a pleomorphic adenoma. There is no way you can read about all that tonight, and you have to get up at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow. So you go to bed, and the next morning you do not really know why we even treat asymptomatic hypertension in the first place. Solution: Read for an hour every day. Afterward you can do whatever you want and not feel guilty or overwhelmed. You will also be amazed at how well you do. Most students do not average anywhere near an hour of daily reading. Read about your patients. Remember Darwin’s theory of medical education: “It cannot be that rare if you are seeing it.”
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