“Expertise generally consists of doing a lot of small, boring, seemingly insignificant things very, very well”

Dr. Willard said this to the Internal Medicine club at a lunch meeting at one point and it’s really stuck with me. Because, it’s really true but I’d never thought about it that way before.

On TV, the experts in things have these really cool, sexy jobs where they do awesome stuff all the time. And while veterinarians get to do some really awesome things and save animal lives and such, the process of getting there and the process of doing it are actually rather small, boring and tedious.

As we’re going through the process of learning how to put together our cases for third year correlates, it turns out the process of diagnostic medicine is quite tedious. It’s nothing like House. Granted, we’re generally doing less rare (“zebra”) cases and more routine (“horse”) cases. Also, veterinary medicine is still very closely tied to your clients’ economics, unlike human medicine. We can’t just run hundreds of dollars of tests and hope something sticks, we have to pick the 1 or 2 tests that are most likely to get you the answer you need because that’s all your client is going to pay for.

So, basically, I’m going to keep trying to do these small, seemingly insignificant things very, very well!