When Physicians Don’t Know

Discussing brain magnetic resonance imaging results for neonates with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy treated with hypothermia: A challenge for clinicians and parents

“…Even though it was clear that answers were anonymized, some of the narrative comments evoked this concern. It is common for clinicians to profoundly dislike being placed in a situation where they do not know and to consider uncertainty a taboo topic [ 53 , 54 ]. Another limitation was that our parents' sample size was also small and it was not possible to stratify and analyze responses based on nature/extent of injury.…”

Intraprofessionalism and Peer-to-Peer Learning in American Medical Education

“…Medical school is also an important site where physiciansin-training implicitly and explicitly learn how to confront the uncertainty and impossibility of absolute knowledge in eventual biomedical practice (Fox 1980;Knopes, 2019aKnopes, , 2020Knopes, , 2021. Diverging from the literature (Becker et al, 1961), students in the studies described here were forthcoming about the limits of their knowledge and recognized the value in the diversity of perspectives and knowledges that other students offered rather than feeling institutional pressure to conform to one idea about what it meant to be a physician and struggling to accept an inevitable degree of ignorance in their work.…”

“…In this way, expertise is not simply a matter of "knowing it all" but rather a matter of appreciating and valuing the differences in what other professionals in the same field can offer to the resolution of problems that cut across professional specialties: in this case, to ensure that patients receive care that meets complex and multifaceted health needs. Within this epistemological landscape, fields of knowledge like anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and biochemistry typically have greater primacy to students than ethics, communication, and social science (Knopes, 2019a(Knopes, , 2020, although students nevertheless bring a wide array of knowledge into peer-to-peer learning environments.…”

“…We will demonstrate that peer-to-peer learning is a critical site of health professional socialization, in which students manage vast amounts of biomedical knowledge by learning how to cooperate with fellow future practitioners in the same discipline whose experience and expertise may differ from their own. By reviewing qualitative data from two medical school field sites in the American Midwest, we observe that individual medical students cannot have absolute knowledge of biomedical science and practice (Knopes, 2019a(Knopes, , 2020(Knopes, , 2021 and instead become experts through the cultivation of an intraprofessional culture where knowledge sharing is a key component of education and practice. The institutional cultures of each medical school differed in important ways which shaped the kinds of students it attracted and what kinds of visions it had for the specialties students would pursue, as well as how comfortable students felt relying on others in an intraprofessional capacity.…”

Articulating the canon: The sociology of medical education from 1980 to 2000

“…This abundance of knowledge raises pertinent questions, chiefly among them how medical students decide what is important to learn. Knopes (2020aKnopes ( , 2020b has investigated the management of ignorance and knowledge in medical professional socialization. She developed the notion of "sufficient knowledge" to describe "the process of emphasizing information with the greatest perceived utility for a particular condition of training or situation of medical practice, while deliberately deemphasizing or ignoring information that is not deemed necessary in context" (p. 447).…”