St. Augustine: “Fallor ergo sum”
When I was in charge of the medical residency programs in Grand Rapids, Michigan, David Leach introduced me to the expanded Dreyfus Model of how physicians can progress from beginners to masters. I was always struck by how master physicians freely admitted their mistakes and used them as a teaching tool. As a young surgical and cytopathologist, my sanity was saved more than once by University of California San Francisco’s Dr. Theodore R. Miller, a true master of cytology, being willing to share with me some of his mistakes. I do not honestly think I could have survived in diagnostic pathology without his guidance and wisdom. Years later, I still remember Dr. Miller showing me a breast fine needle aspiration biopsy slide of fat necrosis that mimicked ductal carcinoma and a case of wrongly diagnosed pancreatic cancer that turned out to be inflammatory atypia.
Mistakes and errors are on my mind because I just finished reading some extraordinary works.