I work in medical research and know many healthcare practitioners. They often share anonymized stories about their patients and higher level summaries of patterns they see across their patient population or in their institution.
I couldn’t learn to be a doctor from these occasional stories, but I understand the intimate details of their work much better than I would from articles, especially the social side.
For example, my geneticist friend’s complaints about companies selling unregulated genetic tests helped me understand why doctors are so much more conservative than researchers when it comes to new and unregulated medical tech. Researchers see developing new tests as innovation, doctors as often injecting more noise and confusion into an already overwhelming system.
That was a crucial insight for me as a biomedical researcher thinking about how to make a clinical impact.
I work in medical research and know many healthcare practitioners. They often share anonymized stories about their patients and higher level summaries of patterns they see across their patient population or in their institution.
I couldn’t learn to be a doctor from these occasional stories, but I understand the intimate details of their work much better than I would from articles, especially the social side.
For example, my geneticist friend’s complaints about companies selling unregulated genetic tests helped me understand why doctors are so much more conservative than researchers when it comes to new and unregulated medical tech. Researchers see developing new tests as innovation, doctors as often injecting more noise and confusion into an already overwhelming system.
That was a crucial insight for me as a biomedical researcher thinking about how to make a clinical impact.