Focus

I might not have to worry too much about the prospect of general medicine. In a warm winter afternoon (actually a few days before I put up my recent blog entries and received the email comments from VW and JW), I participated in the examination of my own specialty board.

It is my strong belief that doctors of a similar personality go to the same specialty, and nephrologists are generally pragmatic and time-conscious. The seven of us lunched together, went through the questions, and, we finished (roughly) on time. Most of the questions are set in a way that it is difficult to fail even if the candidate does not happen to know the specific detail – as long as he or she has been actively practising and knows what’s happening on earth.

My friend JW certainly holds a similar opinion, and he always advises students and trainees against an examination-oriented study. His argument is simple: Examinations are generally easy (we are serious) but the scope is inevitably narrow; it is much more difficult to know enough and be a competent doctor – which, unfortunately, is our ultimate aim.

PS. You may find it difficult to believe examinations are easy – they are, in fact, difficult, but, only for the examiner. Since the voice of asking for a fair examination was becoming ever louder in the past twenty years, questions and scenarios need to be standardized, and there left less and less suitable material for examination of a large class of students (or trainees). The situation is somewhat similar to the steamed fish of a Chinese wedding banquet – it is always cultivated grouper and no one would ever think of wild ones, not because the couple wishes to cut the cost or help the environment, but you could never find twenty or forty wild groupers of a similar size on that very day.