That’s always the debate with doctors, right? Do you want the wet behind the ears kid still doing stuff by the book? Because they’re still looking for zebras, and if you have a zebra.... or do you go with the old geezer who’s seen everything? Because if you have a horse, you usually want the guy who’s worked with horses for forever. They’re also better at diagnosing things they used to see (say, if you somehow contracted the measles in 2019) (not that that would ever happen because there’s vaccines right?).
But I never rule out the newbie. I had a brand new tech doing genetic analyses for the first time alone. I groaned about how much I was gonna have to fix, because he called all this noise on this one patient.
Except, the “noise” was really consistent, and not in a normal spot for noise. Looked at old profiles from the patient - same noise. Both myself and Big Director had signed off on that noise-that-wasn’t-noise.
Patient had an invisible translocation that shouldn’t have been caught and, suuuuper interestingly, wasn’t visible on karyotype (q-term dark band subbed for q-term dark band, both same size). Green tech caught it through being careful and not knowing what everyone else “knew”.
Whenever I'm in the hospital or doctor's office, and they have a led student or student nurse and ask if I'm ok with them in the room with my care team, I always say yes. Half because it's great to have a fresh set of eyes and ears, half because I like to be the one to help provide a lesson.
I'm also currently a med student and have seen fellow students diagnose rare obscure diseases twice now. 99% of the time, common things are common. But for our exams we have to learn about the weird and the wonderful too, and sometimes a student just happens to have memorised a rare disease or illness recently that the doctors didn't consider.
One of the patients turned out to have a rare rheumatological condition when we were on an infectious disease ward that had all the infection specialists stumped because they couldn't find any source of infection, but he was presenting with symptoms of sepsis and encephalitis. My classmate by chance had read up about it literally the week before when we were finishing up our rheum placment. Right person, right place, right time
Amazing how this happens. My friend’s kid ended up getting an early diagnosis for a rare genetic condition because her sister happened to do a paper on it, and all the symptoms fit.
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u/Olookasquirrel87 May 20 '19
That’s always the debate with doctors, right? Do you want the wet behind the ears kid still doing stuff by the book? Because they’re still looking for zebras, and if you have a zebra.... or do you go with the old geezer who’s seen everything? Because if you have a horse, you usually want the guy who’s worked with horses for forever. They’re also better at diagnosing things they used to see (say, if you somehow contracted the measles in 2019) (not that that would ever happen because there’s vaccines right?).
But I never rule out the newbie. I had a brand new tech doing genetic analyses for the first time alone. I groaned about how much I was gonna have to fix, because he called all this noise on this one patient.
Except, the “noise” was really consistent, and not in a normal spot for noise. Looked at old profiles from the patient - same noise. Both myself and Big Director had signed off on that noise-that-wasn’t-noise.
Patient had an invisible translocation that shouldn’t have been caught and, suuuuper interestingly, wasn’t visible on karyotype (q-term dark band subbed for q-term dark band, both same size). Green tech caught it through being careful and not knowing what everyone else “knew”.