Admit What You Don't Know - An Unmentioned Organizing Principle

Everybody has ideas about medical ethics.  Often that is their own version.  There are medical ethicists who routinely comment on it in the media. There is endless speculation about what is ethical and what is not.  That speculation frequently focuses on financial compensation and reimbursement for physicians from outside services like pharmaceutical companies. Every physician in the United States is monitored by their state medical practice board who have varying ideas about what is ethical and what is not. Those ideas can even change over time. When I started out, it was common for physicians to prescribe various medications for friends and family members. At some point that was determined to not be a good practice for several reasons and it became a general rule adopted by most medical practice boards.

Ethics debates frequently are political debates and other common areas have to do with abortion, resuscitation, and unnecessary prolongation of life. Many of these debates played out in public arenas and resulted in legislation, court rulings, and practical applications like living wills and advanced directives in the event that the decision-maker is compromised and decision-making is limited.

I am constantly thinking about my training and how it relates to what I do every day. That means that from time to time I revisit what happened to me during that time frame and what it means today. I always seem to come up with something new even though I have thought about it many times before. Just yesterday I was contemplating the scenario where President Trump talked about disinfectants and ultraviolet light being used to kill coronavirus in humans. There are many places where you can view that videotape as well as the responses to it. In a politically charged partisan atmosphere many of those responses are predictable. The President and his allies are certainly in a spin control mode since this happened. They are contemplating having less frequent news conferences which I would agree with. Political opponents have seized the opportunity to characterize this as a lack of leadership and irresponsible statements. One of the physicians working with the president has suggested that he was simply “problem-solving” and “thinking out loud”with physicians in the Department of Human Services.

I think there is a more parsimonious explanation that will take me back to the third year in medical school. It should be fairly apparent to any trained physician that the President does not really know much about medicine. The clearest example would be his quote that we don’t really know much about nature of the coronavirus pathogen, when of course we do. There has never been a better time to study viruses and their molecular biology than right now. The President has made many other errors when talking about the pandemic and the associated medical problems. He approaches it like he does political rhetoric. He makes contradictory statements to gain some time and then sweeps in at the end with the correct position even though it is often in opposition to what he said in the first place. In medical school that would not get you past the third year.

Third-year medical school is an exciting time. Everyone is starting intense clinical rotations. You are scaling up in your ability to see more patients per day. You are getting more efficient in conducting the elements of the patient evaluation, differential diagnosis, and treatment planning. You are learning more about relevant laboratory and imaging testing. But there is also important ethical element that you need to discover right away or you rapidly get into very deep trouble. Simply stated that element is - know what you know and what you don’t know and clearly state whether you know something or not. The corollary is that time is of the essence and there is no time for equivocating. If you are asked directly by an attending physician or a senior member of the team and you draw blank - the correct answer is “I don’t know”. There is no room for guesswork or rhetoric.

During my training I saw some relatively brutal enforcement of that rule. One conversation went like this:

Attending: “Do you know this patient’s calcium level?”

Intern: “I think it was 10.8…”

Attending: “Do you know or not? Are you just guessing?”

Intern: “No I am pretty sure it was 10.8.”

In this brief scenario, the correct answer was “I don’t know”. It turns out the calcium level was not 10.8. That led to a fairly intense private conversation between the attending and the intern about his expectations of patient care and how they were not being met. The intern was subsequently asked to leave the program.

I witnessed several scenarios like this and they are tense situations. The expectation of course is that individual team members will know everything about the patient particularly all the relevant evaluation and testing that occurs in the hospital and that they will be able to synthesize that for the attending during rounds. It is a high-pressure situation because all eyes are on the person being questioned. I can still recall being in ICU with a fairly intense pulmonary medicine staff person who decided he wanted to question my favorite Internal Medicine intern on pulmonary function testing in various lung disorders. For anyone not familiar with this testing there are a set of esoteric terms and concepts that vary across lung diseases and the attending in this case wanted an extemporaneous summation. He provided no structure whatsoever for the intern. The other four members the team took a deep breath and focused on the intern. In his southern drawl he provided a perfect description of pulmonary function testing and how it varied in the pulmonary conditions of interest. It was pretty amazing.

Similar high-pressure situations don’t go that well. I had just started out on a cardiology team in the same hospital and rounded on a patient and went to present to one of the cardiologists. It seemed to be going pretty well until he asked me to show him the chest x-ray. In those days, we had to go to Radiology and collect all of the films we needed, check them out, carry them around all day and then return them. I did not have a chest x-ray and for the next several minutes fielded a few sarcastic comments like “You didn’t think a chest x-ray was important in a cardiology patient?” In similar situations it was always better to say “I don’t know” rather than trying to bluff your way through a barrage of questions from an attending physician. Not having a chest x-ray is relatively easy one.  It is harder if it is a question about specific history or data or information that you are expected to know.

An important part of the lesson is that even though it may be emotionally painful to say “I don’t know.” it must be said if you really don’t know. There is no spin after the fact in medicine. The patient and everyone else on your team depends on you being able to make that statement. When you complete your training - it is equally important to make that statement to your coworkers and the patients you treat.  I have never really heard much comment about it in the media or by the ethicists but for me it is a central organizing value. There is a ripple effect. If you don't want to end up with that statement - you do everything possible to prevent it.  But most importantly you recognize the vast information base of medicine and you recognize the uncertainty of the day to day decisions.

This post is not supposed to be a lesson for politicians. It is not a suggestion that politicians should adopt ethics that are useful to physicians. It is a simple observation that being able to admit that you don’t know something even when it seems like you should is transformative. It is better to be brutally honest with yourself upfront than having to do it later to deal with the complications. All medical decision-making and professionalism hinges on this ethic. 

When it comes to medicine - you can't just make something up or think you know something - when you don't.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA





Full Disclosure:

I am a small "i" independent.  Yes - I am one of those guys who does not hesitate to "waste" his vote on a non-major party candidate, but at times have voted for those candidates.