This Whole Med School Thing

I'm thinking about how to learn to be a doctor, and specifically how to get through this rotation (Internal Medicine). I think the most important skill I'm learning is how to generate a differential diagnosis, which means, given a certain patient presentation (e.g. chest pain, shortness of breath, and fever), making a list of possible causes.

I need to do more of this. It's crucial to being a doctor, possibly the most important skill we need to learn. But what I do for most of each day is other (also important) stuff, like talking to the patients, examining them and noticing any changes in their condition, looking up the results of labs drawn and any procedures or imaging, and having small teaching sessions with the residents in which we teach them or they teach us about specific diseases or tests. Or sitting in lectures, tracking down old records from other hospitals, calling in consults... the list goes on and on. I dunno, it's just easy to never feel like I know enough.