Judgment

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." So much of what we do in medicine is by gestalt, recognition of patterns, and clinical hunches. This never made much sense to me when I was young and naive, but after a few years of experience, I'm starting to develop that hard-to-pinpoint decision making where my gut tells me something just doesn't feel right. I'm learning to trust in it and finding that more often than not, it guides me in the right direction. The intensive care unit is full of these quandaries, and spending month after month here, I'm recognizing that I don't know all that many more facts now than I did a year ago, but the experiences I've had really put some perspective and depth into my clinical judgment.