“I got this.”
Recently, a medical student was seeing a patient on my schedule who was presenting with anxiety. The student reviewed her chart, knocked on the door, and entered the room with a warm smile. Fifteen minutes later, he was out and presenting her story to me. After glancing down at the chicken scratch on his folded sheet of paper, he looked at me with a confident expression that said it all: “I got this.” There were many patients this student had seen with me that day that had challenged if not confounded him. Unexplained fatigue in one, atypical chest pain in another, brittle diabetes in a third. As a result, we had wide-ranging discussions about how to approach uncertainty in clinical practice—thoughtful questioning, a focused exam, a logical differential diagnosis, and a sensible plan to move forward. But above all, we discussed how good medical practice requires confidence purified by a healthy dose of humility.
Nonetheless, there he sat with a knowing grin on his face.
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