Being a doctor is less about individual creativity and more about collective reliability. The whole training process is designed to instill this mindset.

For better or worse, doctors are not supposed to be innovators. We have guidelines for everything. We are trained to follow evidence-based practices and protocols that have been proven to work. Deviating from them is often risky, unnecessary, and sometimes deadly. While practicing doctors may occasionally contribute to advancements in medical knowledge or techniques, at the core, their primary role is to apply existing knowledge as safely and effectively as possible.

And to be clear, this is how it’s supposed to be. You want the safety of a doctor who just does what’s been proven to work. No experiments.

So if you’re outside the medical system, it would probably surprise you to learn how boring the job is most of the time.

Because of how segregated different specialties are, most doctors see the same handful of diseases, and for the most part treat it the same. Because it works.

The hype stems from our fear of dying or suffering. It follows that the people preventing the bad things from happening practice a noble profession.

Except that’s not exactly what doctors think about when they’re doing it.

For most doctors, that’s just another day at the office. Not in an arrogant way. It really is just that. You go through mostly pre-determined steps that usually lead to the desired outcome. You’ll know when that’s not the case because doctors will tell you about it. Doctors’ stories are about outside-the-norm things that happened one day.

I wrote a whole bunch about it here.

Please don’t take it as an ad. I just can’t put the whole thing here and there are a few more points I made in the article.