Doctors are expected to make high-stakes decisions quickly and often. And while plenty of medical guidelines exist, sometimes finding the right answer relies on intuition as much as logic. So what happens when suddenly that intuition is gone?
Dr. Ronald Dworkin, a retired anesthesiologist, found out the answer to that question about halfway through his 28-year career.
“ Usually as an anesthesiologist, I worked along a narrow groove, turned out the cases, made snap decisions with confidence,” Ronald said. “But now I [sensed] some kind of inner harmony was gone.”
Ronald tells Anita about why intuition is so important for decision making, and what lessons we can all take away from the story of how he lost his intuition and got it back. Ronald is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
Anita also talks to her brother-in-law, Dr. Amit Gupta, about training intuition in the next generation of doctors and how technology may be changing the ways we relate to intuition. Amit is a gastroenterologist and an assistant professor of medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill.
