The further I progress in specializing in medicine, the more I realize how much my daily abilities deteriorate.

Take language, for example. Aside from the broken Spanish I acquire from my Hispanic patients, I rarely invoke English dictum beyond the eighth grade. Our vocabulary in the office is limited to a defined collection of complex medical terms strung together with linking verbs and qualifiers describing outcomes (hemorrhage, blindness, infection, inflammation). Outside of  the office, I’ve struggled to identify common objects like “spoon” and “basket” without using hand gestures.

Is this shift simply a result of natural selection (adaptation on steroids!)? French naturalist Jean Lamarck coined terms like “use” and “disuse” for adaptation spanning generations. Are professionals contributing to their own extinction by being good at their job?

It would be interesting to measure cortical function throughout the course of medical school. This could be followed with serial PET scans to localize metabolic activity in the brain. Areas that fail to sustain signal can be used to correlate with mapped cortical regions. Indeed, a spatial correlation in such an experiment would be damming to future physicians-to-be…

misc euphemisms, humor, life