Humility in medicine: what, why, and how

Humility is an important trait of medical practitioners, but it has often been misunderstood as running antithetical to professional excellence or projecting confidence in clinical decision-making and constrained by practical considerations inherent to the practice of medicine. Yet, humility is essential to cultivating good physician self-awareness, openness to learning and patient-centredness in clinical encounters, as well as fostering collegiality within the broader fraternity. In this respect, humility is not merely an aspirational trait of 'ideal physicians' but rather a professional competency that must be explicitly taught and modelled in medical training. In this article, we examine the core constructs of humility (intellectual, cultural and relational) in the context of clinical medicine and discuss practical strategies for cultivating this fundamental attribute among physicians.