‘Good (Medical) Judgment Comes from Experience, and Experience Comes from (Medical) Misfortune’

Abstract

I was watching a news program about the events concerning the coronavirus pandemic. The emphasis was about what went wrong. I found the program was partly “blaming” the “slow reaction” of the medical community in this country. In watching the interviews of the physicians involved, I recalled several medical aphorisms (in addition to previous published ones1-3) that, with a little tweaking, offer a better understanding of the current situation. These are: “Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment,” “It is better to be lucky than good,” “The truth is in the patient, not in the textbook,” and finally, “You can't know what you don't know,” combined with, “the more you know, the more you know you don't know.” With examples we can see how these aphorisms help us better understand the practice of medicine and how to interpret medical misfortune.