Under the Magnifying Glass

I remember my first week of college.  I remember sitting at a stop light with my new room mate, Kyle.  As we sat there a green light turned in the perpendicular street and cars slowly started to march across our path, as they made an arching left turn, driving down the opposite way we had came. He asked me if I ever "just watched the faces in the cars as they passed by" wondering who they were, what they were doing...what they were going to do.  That memory sticks in my head, a person I considered a relative stranger making such a randomly honest statement to me, it caught me off guard, I lied stating I hadn't ever put much thought into it.  When he had said that, I thought he was weird...and I thought was weird for secretly doing the same thing, but I was young, and as time went on I realized it's one of those taboo things we, people in general, don't exactly "talk" about, after all, it's not always so "benign" to quickly place a person under your magnifying glass.

A very naive 6 year old says, "Are you pregnant?" to a store clerk as his mother checks out at walmart...the mother blushes and begins to check out faster...the store clerk is not pregnant.

A white supremacist screams racial slurs as an African American carries her back pack into a desegregated school for the first time.

The truth is making quick decisions and judgments off of very little is what we all do, it's a survival instinct that is as burned into us as much as the instinct of a bird flying south for the winter.  The truth is most of the time it is very useful helping us navigate this social world we are all apart of, but in the rare instances when it doesn't work, you end up as the example of the word "moron" in some doctor's blog ;P

In training to be a doctor, that magnifying glass isn't "gifted" to you, it simply adds a couple more powers of vision for you to see through.  Before school you see a sickly man pushing a cart down the isle of a supermarket.  You look at the man, you see his disheveled appearance, you look at the large amount of booze he has in his cart and you know what's got him that way.  After medical school you look at a similar sickly man, you realize he is jaundiced, you think he probably has liver failure, you glance at his shopping cart expecting booze...but it has toilet paper and cereal in it, (laughably) you STILL immediately think, "alcoholic". 

However, as I'm going through residency I'm discovering how it's tempering my judgments.  How in meeting patient after patient and getting to know the most intimate details about them, that nothing is as simple as the magnifying glass makes it seem.  The alcoholic sometimes has a VERY good reason for being that way, even if his lifestyle is an unsavory one.  You start to see that the mother who hit the child isn't always a monster, sometimes she's just a very stressed out woman in a bad situation, that was pushed and pushed 'till she snapped.  More and more, I'm coming to the realization that this "magnifying glass" was never meant to be used all by itself, that's why when our teachers were sharpening our vision in medical school they were also teaching us to talk to our patients...to empathize with them...otherwise we run the risk of focusing that glass too much in one place and that can be a very dangerous thing.

Newbie Doc