What We Wish We Had Known in Medical School

You learn a lot by practicing medicine for years. For the two of us, this amounts to over 50 total years of experience since graduating from medical school. We may have forgotten a great deal, yet we remember how tough medical school was and that some mistakes could have been avoided by being better prepared. The purpose of this article is to review six points we wish we had known when we were medical students. Some of the points might be idiosyncratic mistakes whereas other points may be representative of larger shared patterns (we, ourselves, cannot distinguish). Our intent in sharing these points is to help the next generation avoid some of our own pitfalls.