What skills do you think cross-pollinate with being a physician?

[Backpack234]

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Title says it all. Over the past few weeks I've been learning to code, but I can't see how it would add to my career as a doctor outside of gaining the ability to change careers entirely. I'm wondering what other skills do add to being a physician.

 

[gro2001]

Title says it all. Over the past few weeks I've been learning to code, but I can't see how it would add to my career as a doctor outside of gaining the ability to change careers entirely. I'm wondering what other skills do add to being a physician.

I think it depends a lot on whether you want to be an academic or a community doc.

For an academic career, it's best to figure out if you want to focus primarily on education or research. As an educator, you may look into developing skills in some specific area of education, such as curriculum development, assessment, simulation, etc. This may or may not be formal training in some sort of program, with or without a degree, but it's definitely a skill set/expertise worth developing if that kind of career is something you find interesting. If you want to be a researcher, there's a myriad of methodological expertise to be gained. Bench stuff, stats, experimental design, etc.

 

[Lexdiamondz]

being a waiter. seriously.


thanks press-ganey

 

[Groove]

Title says it all. Over the past few weeks I've been learning to code, but I can't see how it would add to my career as a doctor outside of gaining the ability to change careers entirely. I'm wondering what other skills do add to being a physician.

I'm not quite sure I follow entirely. You don't need any supplementary skills to be a better doctor. Pick your hobbies and extracurricular pursuits based on what you enjoy, not what they will gain you at work. The whole point of enjoying what you do outside of work is to avoid burnout.

My favorite stuff to do is mountain bike, workout, snow ski, hike and geek out on technology/games. None of those help me at work, but they sure as hell help take my mind OFF OF WORK.

As for coding. I used to do a lot of that in my previous career. Not so much anymore other than occasional PERL/PYTHON scripting. In general, coding is extremely applicable to virtually any job or career. You can automate a plethora of mundane daily tasks with simple scripting programs. That's primarily how I use them these days. If you enjoy coding, it's anything but a waste of time and will come in handy in a myriad of ways. I'd suggest a scripting language that is popular and can be utilized on multiple platforms. PYTHON is easier to learn if you have no programming knowledge as the syntax is very readable.

 

[Tenk]

 

[Birdstrike]

Title says it all. Over the past few weeks I've been learning to code, but I can't see how it would add to my career as a doctor outside of gaining the ability to change careers entirely. I'm wondering what other skills do add to being a physician.

Media savvy (think Sanja Gupta, Dr Drew, physician news contributors), business and administrative skills, being comfortable in a courtroom (expert witness work), skills in politics, writing (think Michael Crichton, Checkov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sam Shem) all are helpful additions to the talent stack of a physician. Also, add creative thinking as a must to that list, because none of those skills create an easy or automatic pathway to different or interesting work outside of the norm for a physician. It's usually a somewhat unique path you carve out or semi-invent for yourself. Most physicians just grind out patient encounters, so finding advising from people that have combined their skills in unique ways, is difficult.

 

[hundreddaysoff]

Title says it all. Over the past few weeks I've been learning to code, but I can't see how it would add to my career as a doctor outside of gaining the ability to change careers entirely. I'm wondering what other skills do add to being a physician.

Main one that helped me was learning to relate to and gain rapport with non-nerdy people, especially nurses. Ultimately helps me to negotiate with patients and get them what they need and get them out of the ER faster and happier without doing things that might hurt them.

I spent a lot of time on this in residency and there was one attending in particular that really helped me out by pointing out stuff that should've been obvious to me in retrospect. A lot of it is acting, really: Personal presence, pleasant tone of voice, open body language, mirroring, etc. Could probably have learned it just as well by getting and keeping a job waiting tables for a while.

Was a hardcore academic in my former life, so this was not necessarily a natural thing, even though I should have learned it growing up. (Downside of my childhood videogame obsession.) You may well have this skill already, but in hindsight I don't think it's all that common among doctors or doctor-aspirants in general, due to a combination of social class and monomaniacal focus.

Coding should help you in theory, but the problem is EHRs are closed systems and if you work for a big company, they aren't gonna let you run your code on their computers anyway. Knowing how to code lets you see the problems with our systems, but won't often help you to fix them.

"You need to learn to get drunk with Russians." - Nassim Taleb