General Knowledge and General Medicine

I like trivia. A lot. Maybe a bit too much. I played for my high school and university’s competitive trivia teams, have auditioned for the Jeopardy! College Championship, take part in an online trivia league, and go out to pub trivia on Tuesday nights. I think this comes from a love of learning about almost anything. I remember bringing home books about all sorts of subjects from the library as a kid and spending hours on our electronic encyclopedia at home (thank you Encarta ’95).  This continued into my undergraduate as I took courses in a variety of subjects, ranging from art history to astronomy.

I’ve noticed that my retention of general knowledge has suffered since I started medical school. I feel like things that I used to know are being pushed out of my brain by the content I’ve learned in medical school. I didn’t enjoy being unable to recall non-medicine trivia that I used to know, but I tried to tell myself it was ok because that knowledge would essentially be “useless” in my day to day work.

After spending three weeks working in Dr. Ho Ping Kong’s clinic, I just had to revisit this.

During my time at CEEP, I was not only impressed with Dr. HPK’s clinical acumen, but also his knowledge of all things outside of medicine. The most recent example of this was being pimped about the architect of St. Paul’s cathedral (which came up on Jeopardy! this Wednesday- Sir Christopher Wren by the way). It made clinic even more fun than it already was. This knowledge occasionally contributed to his differential when relevant, but what I thought was most interesting is how this knowledge seemed to help him connect with his patients. Dr. HPK’s patients seemed engaged and put at ease when he was able to discuss all sorts of subjects with them, including anything from opera to wildlife. This contributed to an obviously good rapport and clinician-patient relationship, which is key to delivering effective care in the ambulatory setting.  

All of this has got me thinking…maybe trivia isn’t all that useless after all.

-SR