23-June-23

I have been exploring a new book for the past few days, called “Attending”. This book is written by Ronald Epstein, and it talks about mindfulness in healthcare. Sometimes in medical practice, mindfulness is underused, and even highly qualified experts can overlook small details by mistake, which can put a patient’s health in jeopardy. Some ways mindfulness is underused are when clinicians face what’s called “Inattentional blindness”. When we civilians face this, it can be in a trivial scenario, such as finding your keys in the place you just looked. On the contrary, it can be serious, such as your friend talking on the phone while driving and not seeing the car in front of them. When clinicians face this, it may be from misinterpretation, where they see something and think of it to be something else. This can lead to misdiagnosis. It’s not unusual. Yes, clinicians can make mistakes, but sometimes I wonder why misdiagnosis happens in the first place. Almost every day clinicians can make errors when looking at a patient’s symptoms, but I wonder what causes it. Epstein addresses that clinical care is quite fast paced, which could be a reason for common errors. He also talks about his curiosity. Did clinicians not even look properly for the cause of symptoms? Did they see it but misjudge its significance? Did they overlook it because it didn’t seem relevant? Did they lose interest in looking for explanations? All of these factors are what fall under Inattentional blindness. There is another issue that’s germane to Inattentional blindness. You may find yourself facing this often. Sometimes, we might miss important things that are verbally addressed to us. You could be having a conversation with someone, and completely ignore an important detail they’ve just shared. At times, you could just end up not hearing what people are saying to you at all, yet your hearing test results come out as normal. You and I are both wondering how this happens. Research shows that if we focus immensely on a task, it interferes with our listening ability. This fact is true in many cases. It could be true in your daily life. The same thing happens with clinicians. They could be speaking to a patient with full focus, but they might accidentally disregard a couple details the patient addresses. The information missed could possibly lead to worse endings, and put the clinician in a deep state of regret. I am still curious about how such disregards can happen, even with a high attention span. All in all, Inattentional blindness and deafness are frankly quite similar, and they’re quite fascinating to observe, considering they can happen to anybody at all.