TILIR #3: Mentors

Through the course of my medical career, I've met and worked with many very talented and  accomplished doctors. The old adage of "those who can't do, teach," does not generally hold up in medicine. In pediatrics, mediocre physicians can plod along just fine in an urgent care or private office, but if you're teaching medical students, residents and/or fellows, you need to be on top of your game. We question everything and have the entirety of medical literature at our fingertips via our phones and computers.

What we are really hoping to glean from our mentors is the wisdom and experience that is more difficult to codify into guidelines and algorithms. Some of our younger attendings seem to know every relevant paper published in the past 5 years in pediatrics, no matter how obscure. But some of the older attendings can reliably call that a seemingly stable patient will be in the ICU by morning just by glancing at them. The former talent we can learn from reading books and going through practice questions, but the latter just takes time and purposeful observation.

Today I got to work with another one of those mentors that simultaneously make me proud to be in this profession, afraid that I'll never be good enough, and hopeful that someday I might be. It's remarkable how much has changed since her generation of physicians were in my position. The hospital here in Grand Rapids only had a couple pediatric floors, the residency only had a quarter the number of residents, the residents drew their own patient's blood, there were no intensivists or neonatologists on call overnight, and they saw countless children hospitalized or dead from illnesses that we never even see today thanks to vaccines. I often wonder what medicine will be like 30 years down the road when I have been practicing as long as she has.

TIL: Stickler syndrome is one of the broader constellations of symptoms that includes the Pierre Robin sequence. Pierre Robin (pronounced "Pee-air Row-ban"), consists of a small, receded jaw, protruding tongue, and cleft palate. It is non-specific and can have numerous causes and several distinct associations. With Stickler syndrome, the Pierre Robin findings are joined by hearing loss, arthritis, severe myopia, and retinal detachment.