Physician Leadership – Trained, Not Born

Although I have always dreaded the moment I would start an article with “when I was a medical student,”… here it goes: We were not trained to be leaders. In fact, the last thing we were looked to was to be leaders of anything. We were selected based on our individual achievement, academic and otherwise. Medical school was spent cramming as much information into one’s head as possible, no matter how obscure, and then learning how to pluck that information out to diagnosis and treat our patient’s disease. Residency wasn’t any different, although the focus changed to a degree. Nonetheless, we filled our heads with even more information and learned to apply it, one patient at a time. I suspect medical education is a bit better, but from my perspective as a paleoanesthesiologist, it doesn’t appear to have changed...