The Art of Pimping

If you are a medical student or resident, you will get pimped a lot during rounding. Pimping is your attending, normally older and smarter ask you a serial of questions to test your medical knowledge. The purpose is to keep you humble but at same time encourage the growth and learning. It is a fine art to keep you down to earth and it has been a time-honoured tradition for medicine. Some people think shame-based learning is the heart of the medicine, because there is always something you do not know, a diagnosis you can not make. It is designed to knock down your self-esteem and make you keep learning. And medicine has encourage life time learning and exams for physicians.

In my the other life before residency, I worked with lots of business people and they are trained differently. They are trained to be confident and aggressive, even something they do not know, they never show they do not know. They can quickly google something online, knows a little bit about it and make a big talk about it. When they make the presentation, it sounds like they know everything about it. But this is not going to work for a physician, that is why medicine needs years of training and hard work and numerous exams, because we are treating human beings. If you make a mistake, that is somebody's life on the line.

It is interesting to observe two different ways of thinking and learn from both sides.