What non-scientific, practical things do you wish you learned in medical school (or nursing, dental, public health, etc) that you think would help support your career and/or personal interests?

The importance of keeping up with and participating in political action in medicine. People don't realize how little effort it takes, but every signature on a petition and every letter sent to a local or state representative matters. The easiest way to do this is to donate  to a medical PAC - political action committee, particularly for the  specialty or association you are interested in. These PACs gain a voice in Washington  by participation rates more than actual dollar amounts donated. Also, sometimes state medical  associations already have form letters for you to write for whatever hot  topic is brewing, so join those associations and subscribe  to their newsletters. It's very easy - I only had to click on a link on  the newsletter and then type in my name and zip code and it gets sent  to my local representative. Indifference is poison and results in non-medically trained lawmakers to decide your fate.  Instead of complaining, doctors need to take action. It's your and your patients' futures. How the business of medicine works. Billing one way versus another way for the same treatment/procedure can make a difference to your department, which could result in a serious scolding towards you by your boss or the hospital if you do it incorrectly. If you run your own practice, negotiation skills are a plus - you may come upon an insurance company that is trying to reimburse you less than what you should be receiving. Financial planning. Pretty much every doctor is in training until around 30 years old or sometimes more. Then once finished, they're obsessed with paying off student loans and sometimes indulging after all that training that they don't properly plan for retirement until too late. Alternative medicine. It always aggravates me when someone scoffs at the thought of taking herbals. Lots of patients take them, and these herbals have real, and sometimes serious, interactions with other drugs. It is of utmost importance to know this! Also, remember to ask your patients if they take herbals (and name a few) because they don't always consider those as "medications". Know how to critique a paper or study. There are many pharmaceutical and equipment companies out there that are acutely aware that doctors are bad at picking apart a study that they conclude in their studies that their product is superior when the data does not support it, and doctors believe them and use the product. This could go along with the answer on here about understanding statistics as well. Understanding these studies can be difficult though, so at least go in with an open mind sprinkled with skepticism. Have hobbies. If you eat, drink, and sleep medicine, you're putting yourself at risk for burn out and resentment. There's more to life than work. When you are happy, then you are also more likely to treat your patients with more compassion. Don't be afraid to innovate. Medicine needs to move forward, not stay stagnant. While sometimes it's okay to say, "That's how we've always done it," just be mindful that there's nothing wrong with gentle pressure to change old and outdated habits either. Otherwise we would still be doing blood-letting therapy to take care of ailments. Remember where you came from. Treat everyone, no matter their title or position, with respect. We are all human beings living in society together. Just because you're a doctor doesn't make you better than everyone else.

I am not an MD, but from my experiences with doctors, I wish that they understood statistics better.

Great answers so far. I would echo the point about personal interactions with patients. As a student you're so harried and pressured you don't pay attention to talking to patients and you are just trying to impress your attending. As a clinician you realize being a doctor IS talking and comforting your patients. Your patient is there to seek comfort from you, your speech, your mannerisms, your conduct is what your patients use to evaluate you as a doctor.  I've known plenty of doctors who may not be the greatest clinician have very busy practices due to patients feeling like they are listening to their patients. The biggest reason patients sue? The doctor never listened to me. It doesn't need to take a long time. A touch on the hand, an inquiry about their family or hobby is all it takes. Getting along with colleagues. Like or not doctors usually do not do solo practices anymore and you will have partners. You need to learn how to get along with your partners just like being in a marriage. Call schedules, covering for each other, compensation, there's a lot of potential problems unless you know how to deal with each other. I've known plenty of residents who thought they were god's gift to medicine who were selfish jerks. They will not be employed in one place for long. In fact when I hire if a candidate has moved around a lot of practices without a good explanation that's a huge red flag. Learn to help each other out and be a TEAM player. Be professional and don't whine if you get an extra admit or consult. Do not try to dump it on the next guy coming on shift. This will reflect on you the rest of your career. I'm in a practice now with my partner who used to be my attending in residency. My conduct during residency was what he remember when he recruited me when I moved to the area. In a specific area of the country people will remember how you were during med school and residency and will express it if you were difficult to work with. You absolutely need to learn about the business of medicine and it's an absolute shame that medical schools teach students nothing about it. Unfortunately med school faculty are usually life long academics who have never worked in the real world. You need to learn about HMOs PPOs Medicare Medicaid and how reimbursement is done. Most residents will panic once training is done and get to easiest job they can find (usually the biggest employer in the area like Kaiser). You need to take your time and really talk to a lot of people about their practices and expose yourself to private practice, groups either single or multi specialty, and large networks and really find your niche. Don't panic and settle. Learn how coding for billing works and be familiar with Medicare rates for the common encounters and procedures in your specialty. It saddens me when a new grad thinks he should make 300k a year and only wants to see 12 patients a day. Sorry but the math does not add up. Keep in mind you're now in the real world and act like the professional that you are. Be aggressive in pursuing your opportunities.

Excellent answers so far but to add 1) How to make an impact in the political process. Medicine is being changed on a political level often without proper input and discussion by the medical community. The AMA tries but is pretty ineffective and they lost a lot of support when they blindly backed the ACA without discussing it with the membership. I only know a single MD who is involved in the AMA and I know literally hundreds of doctors. 2) I want to reiterate about nutrition, and vitamins. Especially with alternative  medicine being prominent. I get asked questions all of the time about supplements and I have to say I don't know. 3) Baby care. I learned about pediatric disease and normal milestones but I didn't learn how to change a diaper, or make my daughter go to sleep, or how much she is supposed to eat. Thank god for all of the parenting blogs that my wife reads (she is also an MD and agrees with this answer) 4) How to exercise most effectively. I feel like most "fitness gurus" actually know a lot more than me about fitness. But then again fitness tends to be more related to orthopedics and sports medicine than to eye surgery.

Not much, looking back to med school in the sixties: better doctor-patient communication training (is already being implemented at the moment). some training in running medicine as a business, important even if you don't have a practice of your own, because I firmly believe that doctors should at least share managerial responsibility so not to let the managers run wild and very impractical and stupid decisions being made by people far removed from the working floor with no medical expertise at all. learning how to cope better the stresses of the job, seeing that in the USA around 30% of the physicians have some kind of burnout.

These are the skills that I picked up, developed and improved upon as my medical training evolved.  They were not offered in medical school/training per se but because I somehow knew they were useful I started to look for opportunities to cultivate them while studying, training and practicing medicine.   1.    Communication skills/empathy training:  social skills or not I faithfully believe that every medical student has some compassion for other human beings – why else would you enter a field that is rooted in helping others?  However, having compassion does not mean that you can communicate or show it very well when needed.  For example, I knew a resident who was whip smart and would read/research articles to find treatment options and answers for his patients.  He clearly cared about the patient/family and was certainly dedicating his time and energy working to find answers for them.  But his delivery and bedside manner was like a bull in a china shop.  He did not pick up on body language cues, did not realize timing of breaking news was important, did not offer empathy when family needed it.  The desire to help was incongruent with the delivery.  The family and patient do not remember what you DO (ordering the most state of the art test/lab, staying up late with PubMed, coordinating the best consult team) – they remember how you make them FEEL (he validated/understands that my son is having a hard time with the news of my cancer, he picked up on caregiver fatigue in my wife, he saw through my silence/anger as fear of the unknown and offered chaplain services).  Here is a wonderful link to an easy learn it yourself communications tool – there is an app as well for Apple users:  http://www.vitaltalk.org/quick-guides   2.    Public speaking skills:  I would like to first acknowledge, support, and encourage what my fellows colleagues have advised thus far which is learning to be politically active.  In medical school, I took time away from studying to “go to the Hill” – Capitol Hill in Washington DC that is.  Every year there is a nationwide call for students, residents, fellows and practicing physicians to attend DO Day on the Hill where we can attend scheduled meetings with our congress persons to talk to them about health care reform, SGR repeal, GME increases/reallocation and other current issues of debate.  Nothing gives you more confidence and empowerment than going to the seat of our government and passionately talking to the people that vote on these very agenda items.  There are other ways to go to the “hill” without having to do to DC such as White Coats on Call, local/state political action committees, medical state societies, and hospital committees.  As a medical student – when you are asked to step up and out of the classroom to volunteer and speak for a cause, it allows you to get serious and passionate about what else matters besides getting honors – it gets you ready to speak professionally, intellectually and effectively to different audiences.  Audiences that can one day be a difficult family meeting, or pitching a project charter to your board of directors, or engaging an entire department to believe in process improvement pathways. 3.    Self preservation/mental health:  this ties in with nutrition, cooking, exercise, and self care as many have already mentioned.  Burnout, compassion fatigue, divorce, depression, suicide – and other mum subjects that physicians don’t share, don’t seek help with, and don’t acknowledge that builds and erodes the spirit over time.  Know your resources (EAP, support groups, debriefing sessions/protocols with your team, couples counseling), know the signs and symptoms of trouble, build a trusting network of family and friends AND ask for help when the time comes.  Your patients deserve the best version of you and we often do not practice what we preach.  You have worked too hard and come too far to let your physical and mental health suffer without intervention.

David Chan did a terrific job of answering this. In retrospect, I did fellowships, wrote books, went to other schools, found new mentors and courses so I could learn what I missed: a. personal clinical ethics, and especially how to understand, accomodate and integrate an individual's patient preferences and mesh them with traditional medical indications (which is what the medical curriculum focuses on), quality of life factors and socioeconomic factors in a particular patient's case. This is not a understanding or reiteration of principles, but b. end of life care, and the importance of family in decisionmaking, and compassion in care: these can and should be modelled and the best clinical professors and faculty do. c. cooking,  food shopping and food selection: this is still rare in medical school, except as a novelty (Michael Roizen and I taught the first such course in a medical school in 2003, and I taught the first culinary medicine course this year): these are fundamental, often daily behaviors which influence chronic disease course more than any other, yet physicians are not trained to know their basics d. the mechanics of physical exercise and its specific components: strength, stamina, flexibility, balance.  When physicians know how to exercise and assess intensity, they do a much better job in identifying factors which make it difficult for patients to do so, and overcoming barriers e. basic stress management: again, a common etiology for chronic disease, but undervalued, in part because physicians themselves have not experienced or learned the science behind fundamental techniques (meditation, relaxation, breath work) f. basics of practical personal behavior change: BJ Fogg's model of motivation, action, trigger (and I would add, reward) works well for many people in habit change in weight management, smoking cessation and other habits: this area too is often thought of as soft, but it is fundamental to medical practice.  I use it with patients often, in an adapted way, for weight management especially.

Unfortunately, this is a difficult question to answer. When I look back, certainly there were deficiencies in my non-medical education. But it is very difficult to learn 80 pages of Gray's anatomy in one night, plus having 5 other courses to keep up with in the first year of medicine. There is just too much to learn about the human body in 4 years. So in retrospect, I feel the amount of MEDICAL knowledge to be learned is really what is important in medical school. Then during further training in residency one can learn the non-medical things. Personally, I needed the full 4 years to properly learn the medical scientific things.This answer is not a substitute for professional medical advic...

1. Communication skills 2. Mediquette (medical etiquette) 3. How to break bad news 4. Setting up private practice 5. Subtle marketing 6. MIS & record keeping 7. Managing money - borrowing & investing The above is from a Family Physician's perspective