"There were so many fewer questions,when stars were still just the holes to heaven."
Jack Johnson
I stand in awe of pediatricians. In my opinion, this particular specialty of medicine requires such an amazing personal and professional skill set and such focus that there are times when healing children seems almost like divination. To be a good doctor you have to have what is called a 'fund of knowledge' which is acquired over years with constant study and practice. This database of experience and wisdom comes to live deep down in the pit of a doctor's stomach and launches whispers and warnings to the brain day and night. Every doctor lives with the doubt, fear and anxiety that comes with the responsibility of caring for people and safeguarding the health that is entrusted to them. Pediatricians must face the additional challenge of gleaning information from their small patients with little verbal communication. At least thats how it seems to an outsider. Pediatricians must learn to speak 'baby talk' and communicate with children on a whole different level than they do with adults.
To be a good doctor, it is vital to develop a sort of sixth sense to percieve the patients symptoms and exam findings on several levels that will lead to a correct diagnosis. Along with a fund of knowledge to relate the physical findings to, doctors have to have a finely developed afferent sense. To be truly afferent is simply to be remarkably intuitive. To be aware of the sensory data you are picking up and to be able to organize these data and formulate an opinion and act on it to bring about the health of the patient. Pediatricians have to be the most intuitive doctors in all of medicine. Their patients are small, they have developing organ systems, they are poor verbal historians, the historian may be an unreliable, anxious or biased parent, the childs exam may be altered by several medications that have been tried at home and, to top it all off, the list of possibilities for a given list of symptoms may include five or six different critical illnesses. The pediatrician must bring their intuitive senses to work every day and even if they can't hit the ball out of the park, the pediatrician must at least get on base every time they step up to the plate.
As a family practitioner I have chosen not to include small children in my practice. While I am an intuitive doctor, work hard at my profession and bring my 'A Game' to each patient encounter, those whispers in my head at 2am that come up from the pit of my stomach don't launch me into a panic anymore and I can, at least try to go back to sleep.
The next time you see your child's pediatrician, remember that you are seeing an extraordinary doctor who has chosen to care for the most important members of our society and must do this with kindness, grace, a whole barrel of knowledge and an almost mystical intuition.
In the science of neurology there are two types of nerve pathways; 'efferent' and 'afferent'. Afferent: 1. (physiology) of nerves and nerve impulses; conveying sensory information from the sense organs to the central nervous system; "afferent nerves"; "afferent impulses".
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