That lecture at 7AM is your patient!
One thing that concerns looking at the relative laziness of medical students (me included) is how it's going to translate to the real world. You can't help but say that this is something normal, and that we grow out of it after we get to a certain age, or god forbid we are sworn in as doctors and professional responsibility takes over. We medical students, mainly because of our relatively heavy workload, are guilty of not doing things that aren't beneficial for us in the short term. We skip that panel lecture because we deem its objectives unclear and because discussions rarely translate into exam questions. We skip the morning lecture concerning "obvious" topics such as ethics or "legal aspects of XXX". That practical session with no pretest? Fuck studying. The list goes on.
How will this kind of prioritization translate into our future roles as doctors? The real problem is that we're dealing with real people with real problems often with many complexities. The danger is that we start to normalize doing things that give direct and immediate benefits (that we perceive) and not giving a shit to things that don't. That patient with the seemingly inane complaint of stomachache that is often hurried away with the regular prescription drugs might be someone with serious risk of gangrenous appendicitis. Or that person who we tend to burn wounds because of a "stove" might be the victim of serious and escalating domestic abuse. It might not be every time that this happens, but our attitude towards these things that might not seem important really does have an impact. We can't calculate that our next "usual" patient won't suddenly die in our care. Our attitude as doctors is formed from our time at medical school and judging by experience it's very hard to change. I'm trying not to be Mr. Obvious , but isn't it reasonable to change some of these habits early on rather than hope we'll "grow out of it"?
So what if that 7AM lecture is your patient, would you treat them the same way?









