Ignorance really is bliss sometimes, and with medicine, the less you know about the way your body works, the better.
Of course I don’t mean on the wards when the consultant is grilling you about various anatomical landmarks or the eight underlying causes of a myocardial infarction; the latter being the constant recitations of the fictional F2 doctor on Casualty ‘Yuki’ during his first day in the ED. Knowledge of basic and clinical sciences is of course a necessary and important prerequisite of being a good doctor.
I’m talking about your own health. The more I know about how my body works, the more I worry every time I feel the slightest possible (pseudo)symptom. It’s gone from extremely silly things like refraining from eating a third banana in a day for fear of becomming hyperkalaemic (raised blood potassium) and potentiating the risk of cardiac arrhyhthmias, to my own self-admission into A&E yesterday evening because I cut my toe rowing and was worried I may have become infected and possibly caught Weil’s disease (which to my dismay the A&E doctor in the Minor Injuries unit didn’t know about and had to use Wikipedia, I kid you not, to find out more about it!).
Thus it only occurred to me yesterday that the purpose of studying epidemiology of disease was, in fact, to put perspective on all the pathophysiology you learn in the pre-clinical years. So when the helpful doctor yesterday pointed out that, according to Wikipedia, Leptospirosis is a “relatively rare bacterial infection in humans” and that Weil’s is an extremely rare complication, it would therefore be extremely unlikely that, through the tiny 5mm cut on my big toe that wasn’t particularly deep (even if it was bleeding rather rapidly), I would have caught an infection. Perhaps I should pay more attention when I hear the word epidemiology in a lecture, else I may well have found the ninth risk factor for a myocardial infarction!
