r/DrBeboutsCabinet

I don’t know what god forsaken cabinet they found all this in but this is by far the oldest stuff I’ve seen lab packing for universities

Today, our of the regular visitors to the HHW came in. They own a downsizing business, and they are currently help a person who used to be a chemist. He dropped of 7 boxes of patent medicines and ingredients for disposal. On Sunday I will take a lot of photographs for you all

Patients sometimes ask me when I’m referring them to another physician, “Is he an older doctor?”

I know exactly what they’re asking. They don’t really care how old the guy is. They want to know if he has some experience on him or if he just got out of training.

It occurred to me recently that somewhere along the way, I became the older doctor.

I graduated from medical school in 1995. I’ve been practicing for more than thirty years. Apparently there is no longer a reasonable argument that I’m one of the young guys.

The strange thing is, I think I like being the older doctor.

Not because I think older doctors are necessarily better. A young physician coming out of residency has some real advantages. He has been trained on drugs, tests and treatments that didn’t exist when I was in medical school. He may know something I don’t.

But there’s another side to it. I may have seen something he hasn’t.

Practice medicine long enough and you also become a little suspicious of the latest and greatest thing. I’ve watched drugs come out with tremendous excitement and later disappear. I’ve seen treatments that everybody was supposed to be doing eventually fall out of favor.

It doesn’t make me anti-new. I use plenty of newer treatments, and obviously you have to keep up with medicine. But I don’t automatically assume new means better anymore.

If an old generic drug has been used for forty years, costs a few dollars, and still does what I need it to do, I’m perfectly happy using it. We know a lot about that drug. We know how it behaves and most of the trouble it can cause. It has a track record.

Thirty years also teaches you something that is harder to put into words.

Sometimes a patient walks in and you know something isn’t right. Maybe the vital signs aren't particularly alarming. Maybe you haven’t even finished the history. But something bothers you.

That isn’t magic, and it certainly isn’t infallible. You’ve just seen enough patients that your brain is comparing the person sitting in front of you with thousands of other people you’ve seen over the years.

I had a tremendous amount of freshly learned medical knowledge when I was a young doctor. What I didn’t have was much experience actually being a doctor.

Now I have thirty years of it.

I’ve forgotten things. Younger doctors know things I don’t. I still have to keep learning, and I'll have to keep doing that for as long as I practice.

But I’ve also watched medicine change, watched patients surprise me, watched accepted treatments disappear, and learned that being absolutely certain of yourself in medicine is usually a good time to become a little less certain.

So apparently I’m the older doctor now.

I think I’m okay with that.