Don't Google Check Your Attending

Now is the season when medical students all over the country start doing away rotations in their desired fields hoping to gain experience and come away with a favorable letter of recommendation for their residency applications. We are currently trying to accommodate dozens of students each month who come and go through our hospital who are undergoing this ritual.

In general, most of the students are great to work with. They are eager to learn and still in awe of some of the amazing work we do in anesthesia. Many have little experience in our specialty other than what they see on TV or over the drapes during their surgery rotations. It's a pleasure to have them around.

But that doesn't mean that they are all easy to work with. We love it when they ask great smart questions about what they are seeing in the operating rooms. However I recently had one student who loved asking questions but then would quickly look up Google on his smartphone to double check the answer I gave him. This was beyond annoying.

If you just want to learn from Google, why bother going to a far away rotation to questions everything somebody is trying to teach? Sure maybe my own fragile ego may have something to do with my insecurity when I'm up against an omniscient presence like Google. But I don't like being told while I'm teaching that my MAC number for Sevoflurane was just a fraction of a decimal point different from that almighty search engine. I find it rude when I'm questioned about every nugget of wisdom I'm trying to impart on our future anesthesiologists while I'm in the process of doing so. It got to the point where I stopped teaching that particular student anything. Instead we just sat there and talked about his personal life and interests, which frankly he seemed far more receptive to than anesthesia.

Every anesthesia attending I discussed this situation with agreed that the student should be more tactful in how they question their instructors. Don't Google check your attending unless you're invited by them to look something up together as a shared learning experience. If you question something that was said, you can always look it up later and perhaps ask another attending about the discrepancy in information. But to constantly berate your teacher with the internet will quickly shut down the conversation and leave you poorer for it. And that's not why students spend thousands of dollars and months of their lives to gain experience to be smart physicians.