How Nearly Two Decades of Teaching Made Me a Better Doctor

I taught medicine and surgery in one form or another from 1995 to 2014. Looking back, I believe those nearly two decades of teaching had a profound influence on the physician and surgeon I became.

Teaching required me to do much more than know the material. It taught me how to collect relevant information, understand it at a deeper level, organize it, question it, and communicate it to the person in front of me.

It also taught me something equally important: medicine has a history. Understanding where our procedures came from and why certain techniques succeeded or failed, has helped me evaluate new ideas more critically rather than simply adopting whatever happens to be popular at the moment.

All of these lessons continue to influence the way I practice medicine and plastic surgery today.

Learning Medicine by Teaching It

My experience teaching medicine began during my residency training. From 1995 to 2002, I taught medical students and other residents while I was still learning myself.

In the beginning, much of this involved the fundamentals: basic science, anatomy, clinical evaluation, and the surgical principles and techniques I was learning from my attending physicians.

There was a continuous cycle:

Learn it. Understand it. Organize it. Teach it.

I might learn an anatomical concept or surgical technique from one attending and later have to explain it to another resident or medical student. Working with attending physicians from different specialties also exposed me to different ways of approaching the same problem. We exchanged ideas across specialties, presented our experiences at meetings, attended national conferences, and wrote scientific articles.

That environment taught me early that medicine is not simply a collection of facts. It is an ongoing process of learning, questioning, exchanging ideas, and refining how we think.

Teaching Forces You to Understand a Subject More Deeply

There is a significant difference between knowing enough about something to use that knowledge yourself and knowing it well enough to teach it.

When you know you will have to explain a subject to someone else, you begin asking different questions.

Why does this work? What is the underlying anatomy? Which details actually matter? What are the limitations? How does this concept relate to everything else we know?

As an attending physician, this became even more important. I was no longer simply sharing information I had recently learned. I was responsible for deciding what was important, organizing it logically, and teaching it accurately to people at very different stages of their medical education.

Teaching a medical student is different from teaching a resident. Teaching an experienced physician is different again. Presenting to colleagues at a national meeting requires yet another level of preparation and understanding.

Having to teach at these different levels repeatedly forced me to revisit subjects, challenge my own assumptions, and understand the material with greater depth.

Teaching made me a better teacher, but it also made me a better student of medicine.

Knowing the History of Surgery Improves Surgical Judgment

One of the less obvious benefits of teaching medicine was that it required me to understand not only how a procedure is performed, but how and why that procedure evolved.

Surgical techniques rarely appear out of nowhere. Most are part of a progression of ideas that may extend back decades.

When you study that history, you learn why a particular operation became popular, what problem it was designed to solve, what surgeons learned from it, and sometimes why it eventually fell out of favor.

That perspective has been extremely valuable in my own practice.

Plastic surgery is constantly evolving. New procedures and techniques regularly generate excitement, particularly today when information can spread very quickly through social media and other platforms.

But not everything presented as new is actually new.

Occasionally, a technique becomes fashionable that is remarkably similar to something surgeons tried years or even decades earlier. Without knowing that history, it is easy to see only the excitement surrounding the current version. Knowing what came before allows you to ask a much more important question:

If we tried something similar before, what happened?

Sometimes an older technique disappeared for good reasons. Perhaps the short-term result was attractive but did not age well. Perhaps it created structural problems. Perhaps another technique eventually produced more predictable or durable results.

Understanding that history does not make me resistant to innovation. Quite the opposite. I believe surgery should continue to evolve.

But innovation should be evaluated critically.

Before adopting a new technique, I want to understand its anatomical rationale, its advantages, its limitations, its long-term implications, and how it compares with what came before it.

Knowing the history makes it easier to distinguish genuine progress from a recycled trend.

That perspective has helped me become more selective about the procedures and techniques I incorporate into my own practice and less inclined to jump on the bandwagon simply because something has become popular.

Good Teaching Starts With Understanding the Listener

Teaching also taught me that knowing your subject is only half of effective communication.

The other half is understanding who is listening.

The same explanation that is appropriate for a first-year medical student may be inadequate for a senior surgical resident and unnecessarily complicated for a patient.

The information has to be accurate in every case, but the way it is organized and communicated should be different.

I came to appreciate that there is an art to this.

First, you have to gather the relevant information. Then you have to determine what matters, organize it into a coherent framework, and communicate it at a level that allows the listener to understand and use it.

Being able to make something understandable without making it inaccurate is an important skill.

And that skill became particularly valuable when I began applying it to patient care.

Teaching Made Me a Better Communicator With Patients

Patients come to a consultation with very different backgrounds and levels of knowledge.

Some have spent months researching their procedure and arrive with sophisticated questions. Others know very little about the anatomy, surgical options, or tradeoffs involved.

My responsibility as their physician is not simply to provide more information.

It is to determine what information is relevant to that particular patient and what they need to understand to make an informed decision.

That may mean taking a complicated surgical concept and explaining it in straightforward language without oversimplifying it. It may mean using anatomy, photographs, or examples to explain why one surgical option makes more sense than another. It also means recognizing when a patient wants greater detail and when additional technical information is no longer helpful.

The lesson I learned from years of teaching was to communicate to the level of the listener rather than simply from the level of the speaker.

That principle remains an important part of every patient consultation I have today.

Teaching Helped Me Become a Better Surgeon and Physician

When I look back at nearly two decades of teaching medicine, I believe the experience improved my practice in several fundamental ways.

It made me more knowledgeable because teaching forced me to understand subjects more deeply.

It made me more analytical because understanding the history and evolution of surgical procedures taught me to question why we do things—not simply how we do them.

It made me more selective as a surgeon because I learned to evaluate new techniques in the context of what surgeons had already tried and learned before us.

And it made me a better communicator because I learned how to take complex information, identify what is relevant, organize it clearly, and explain it in a way that is meaningful to the person listening.

Those skills are as relevant to me today as they were when I was teaching medical students and residents.

Whether I am evaluating a new surgical technique, discussing a difficult case with another physician, or explaining a procedure to a patient, the underlying process remains remarkably similar:

Understand the subject deeply. Know what came before. Identify what matters. And communicate it clearly.

Teaching medicine was never separate from becoming a better physician.

It was one of the ways I became one.