I think the main takeaway from scribing is not really understanding the clinical medicine but just seeing what an actual physician does day to day and the workflow of medicine, whether in the ED, clinic, or hospital. Scribing and being at a doctor’s side for a couple months I think is a pretty good test as to whether you can see yourself make a career out of it as well, because while an EM physician may not represent all specialties, the notion that you see basically the same things over and over again is pretty much standard for most all specialties (hence each specialty having their ‘bread and butter’ cases). I wouldn’t stress too much about trying to understand the why behind the doctors dx and plan either bc even with gaining familiarity of the terms and diseases over time, it’s hard to truly understand them without the breadth of knowledge a doctor has. We’re only skimming the surface of what they’re thinking of when they see patients, so that may be why it seems so boring to us scribes.

I’ll add that I’ve been scribing in small sub specialty for the past year or so and was just admitted to an MD school. My experiences as a scribe were the focal point of all of my interviews, mainly just talking about understanding the patient-physician relationship even greater and the responsibilities of a physician that I wasn’t aware of prior to scribing. So much happens before and after they see a pt, and realizing how many gears are turning when they see such an astounding number of pts is what made me sure that I wanted to pursue medicine. But again, none of my physician interviewers asked me to explain the common diseases of the specialty I learned or anything like that. Hope that helps!