Summary: Doctors work hard to keep up with medical knowledge, but scant attention is paid to how this knowledge is dispensed day-to-day.The following is a transcript of an interview between host Christopher Springmann and guest, Dr. Danielle Ofri... Christopher Springmann: I’m Christopher Springmann, and you’re listening to Body Language. Put four doctors together and what do you get? A quartet! Typically piano, cello, violin, maybe a flute or piccolo trumpet -- and that’s all because of the values of the parents of physicians who typically raise their children to love education, work hard, be successful and learn second and third languages, like music and Latin. So, the question is for our next guest, what can doctors learn from musicians that will make them more effective physicians and please their audience of patients? For answers, we’ll speak with, Dr. Danielle Ofri, MD, author of What Doctors Feel and a cellist... Dr. Ofri, it’s great to have you back on Body Language. Dr. Danielle Ofri, MD: Glad to be back. CS: Are you working on your CME, your continuing musical education today? DO: I absolutely am. I have my cello homework assignment, and I’d better get cracking. CS: You wrote a wonderful article in the New York Times entitled, "What Doctors Can Learn from Musicians." You say, “Last week in my cello lesson, I spent an hour and a half on a single line of music. It was a snarly line and I botched it heroically for 90 solid minutes.” My, you are persistent. DO: Oh, yes. CS: “My teacher”—your patient was your teacher. Your teacher was patient too “but apparently I’m compromising, as I was met with blunt feedback at every step and left feeling wholly dispirited." Oh my goodness, a doctor feeling insecure? That’s amazing. DO: It happens once in a while. CS: What is the relationship between playing an instrument as a musician and using an instrument as a physician or a surgeon? DO: In writing this article, I was making the connection about how we learn to master a subject, in essence irrelevant of the topic itself. But what I found so interesting, in medical school we are always learning and we have information really shoveled at us by lecturers, textbooks, Power Point slides, and our job is to swallow it up, take the test and then move on. Although that comes to a grinding halt once you complete your training. Then you're kind of on your own. Whereas in music, when I sit with my teacher, it’s constant feedback every minute, every two minutes, every line, every note. I get a comment back on what I’ve done right, what I’ve done wrong, and that back and forth, which I guess is more like what we call now coaching, allows me to hone the music right in the moment. In medicine, we really don’t get that at all. CS: In fact, your colleague, Dr. Frank Davidoff, an internist and author of an article entitled "Music Lessons: What Musicians Can Teach Doctors" pointed out that the greatest music teachers are coaches, not lecturers. In contrast, you say most of our teachers in medicine are lecturers. Information is simply shoveled at the student. So what could be different in terms of your continuing medical education if... DO: Well, I postulated... what if when I was seeing a patient a master-experienced clinician sat in with me and either within the visit or just afterward would talk about the subtle things that I could have done better or I might have stumbled, what—both in the questions that I ask and how I do my physical exam. I could probably stand to learn quite a bit. But as it stands, the way we learn is we re-certify every 10 years. And I am re-certifying next year for the American Board of Internal Medicine. CS: Oh boy, and... DO: So what do I do? CS: And you're going to take classes. DO: I have a stack of books about you know a foot and a half thick, and I sit there and go through questions and read. Some people take classes; and I go take a big test one more time, which measures information, that by and large I would look it up if I n
