Sachin Jain: 50 percent of what we teach you will be proven wrong at some point

Sachin Jain posted the following on LinkedIn:

“In medical school, an often-heard refrain was ‘50 percent of what we teach you will be proven wrong at some point, we just don’t know which 50%.’

I was reminded of this reading this breathtaking article in STAT about the powerful work of my residency classmates Amaka Eneanya, MD, MPH, FASN and Mallika L Mendu MD, MBA, FASN to rethink the way we incorporate race into renal function calculations.

I sometimes reflect on this statement and the implicit wisdom contained within:

1. Remain a continuous learner, always. There’s always more to unveil and some of our prior assumptions will prove incorrect over time.
2. Stay humble. It’s easy to get personally invested in a knowledge base once we spend the effort to build that knowledge base. Be careful not to overvalue that investment and be careful to defend against your own hubris.
3. It’s easy to get fixated on something you’ve learned. Unlearning is just as important as learning—and being open to new ideas and data is more critical than vigorously holding on to a belief.
4. Honor the young. It’s easy to be dismissive of a fresh pair of eyes on an old problem. But young people are often unshackled by prior biases and also have new tools, technologies, and perspectives we didn’t have the benefit of to drive understanding.
5. Our openness to new information is the foundation of wisdom. And being knowledgeable is not the same thing as being wise.”

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Source: Sachin Jain/LinkedIn

Sachin Jain is the President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. He also serves as a Board Member at The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, an Academic Hospitalist (WOC) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and a Board Member at America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).