Jan. 7th, 2024 at 9:14 AM
[Edited to add:]
"Of the many, many maladies under examination at any given time at a hospital, one flummoxes more than perhaps any other. Easily diagnosed, but chronic and inoperable, it is … the yips.
Harvard Medical School professor and surgeon James Naples explains how mercilessly the yips can metastasize from the sports world — presenting as, say, a star pitcher who suddenly can’t throw the ball over the plate — into medicine or, really, any other professional field. He experienced a bout early in his training.
“My head had gotten in the way of my hands,” he writes. “I could not bridge the gap between imagined perfection and messy reality.” Worse, the mistakes he made dominated his thinking, whereas successes were quickly written off. In chartspeak: “Doctor perseverating on mistakes.”
The cure came from a kinder attending physician rather than the “God-like” ones under whom Naples first trained; unlike them, “Dr. E” approached errors with “acceptance, not arrogance.”
He taught Naples a lesson that might at first spook would-be patients. Think about your own pursuits and your own fallibility, and you’ll recognize what has to be as true in surgery as in everything else: “Good enough has to be good enough.”