If you want to be a doctor in future what do you need to learn?

Answer 1

The most important thing you need to learn is how to listen. Studies have shown that if patients feel that their doctor has listened to them and cares about them they feel better, are more satisfied with their visit, even if they get bad news, and are less likely to sue if things go wrong. Sometimes people who are training to be doctors forget this with all the other things they have to learn, but ask any patient and they will tell you, people want to know that you care before they care what you know.

Listening is probably the hardest thing to learn, and the thing that takes the most practice, everything else just takes a lot of work. To be a doctor you need to study basic sciences, Biology, chemistry and physics, as well as organic and biochemistry, human anatomy, histology (the study of microscopic tissues) and physiology. You can learn all these things in school, but if you are too young to have anatomy classes and are really keen, you can buy human anatomy colouring books (medical students use them to help learn anatomy but anyone can learn from them without having to know a lot of other stuff first).

You also need to understand epidemiology (the study of diseases in whole populations) and learn critical thinking skills (how to ask the right questions to figure out the truth, instead of just believing everything you are told). If you want you can practice critical thinking by reading a newspaper. Read the headline, then stop and ask yourself what you think the article is going to say and what questions you have. Then read the article and see if what the headline was telling you was the truth or not and if it answered all your questions. After you read the article, ask yourself whose perspective it was written from, did it tell you all sides of the story, is there another way of looking at it that the article didn't talk about. If the article is about a scientific discovery, or references something else that is published look up the original and see if it says the same thing. If you read scientific journals always ask yourself if the authors' interpretation of their results is the only way of looking at it or if there is another way to explain what they found, and what questions you still have.

After you have learned all that, you have to learn clinical reasoning, which is how to figure out the mystery of what is wrong with someone using the clues from what they tell you and what you find when you examine them. You can learn about clinical reasoning from Sherlock Holmes books; they were written by a doctor and the way that Holmes solves a mystery is the same way that a doctor finds a diagnosis (though most of the time they do not even know they are doing it, because their brain gets so used to it they just do it without thinking).

Once a doctor has found a diagnosis they have to know what treatment to give (which you learn with practice when you are training to be a doctor) and they have to be able to explain it and answer any questions, which brings us back to the importance of listening and caring.