They never taught us how to fail
From the Editor
Dr. Schwarzenberger is the former physician editor of DermWorld.
By Kathryn Schwarzenberger, MD, December 1, 2019
Physicians are high performers and success is the norm. In our safety-conscious world of medicine, we learn about errors and are given tools to analyze the root cause in hopes of minimizing the chance of committing the same mistake in the future. We find the problem and we fix the system. But do we fix the person involved? We teach young physicians many things, but how to handle the personal impact of failure is one where I feel we have fallen very short. Go to PubMed someday and search "physician failure." Your efforts will return a long list of articles on almost any imaginable type of failure: heart failure, chronic kidney failure, liver failure…just no "physician" failure. The topic has gained some traction in the past few years in the blog world, particularly as failure — or perhaps more specifically, the impact of failure — is linked with the popular topic of burnout.
This month in Dermatology World we talk with physicians about failure and hear about their strategies for managing it. I suspect some of you will identify with the feelings shared and hope that some of you find the strategies discussed for overcoming failure to be helpful. This is a conversation that starts, but hopefully does not stop, here as I think this is a critically important topic for all of us in medicine to discuss. We may not make the experience of failure any easier, but we can do better about acknowledging that it is an experience we all, as mortal humans, share.
The end of the year is always a great time to reflect on the past 12 months, even as you look forward to the new year. In the upcoming year, we hope to share with you more about what the AAD is doing for our specialty (and trust me, the AAD is doing a lot — we’re just not very good about bragging about it!). This month we highlight the Academy’s Expert Resource Groups and explain how you can get involved. The 15 ERGs bring together diverse individuals who share a common passion about a particular topic, ranging from common skin conditions such as atopic dermatitis to more esoteric genodermatoses such as xeroderma pigmentosum. While ERGs as a group provide expertise on a given subject, individual expertise is not required to get involved; interest and willingness to participate are sufficient to start. It’s a great way to learn more about the subjects that interest you, and you get to do good at the same time!
We wish all of you the best during the upcoming holiday season. Whether you participate in any of the festivities, I hope you find some time to relax and, hopefully, spend time with your family and friends! Do the things that make you happy. And may you find much joy in the upcoming year!
