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Some Medical Student-Innovator Cognitive Distortions

Lathan Liou
MDplus
Published in
7 min readMay 10, 2022

I believe a physician-innovator is an immensely powerful career calling to want to play a role in improving the way healthcare is delivered at a larger scale. However, the road to becoming a physician-innovator may be construed as an inherently abstract path. This means that there’s no one path to get there, and the “there” is also fairly uncertain. Because of this uncertainty, as we all selectively set out on this path to becoming physician-innovators, I wanted to share some personal (early-career) cognitive distortions that I have experienced. I’m borrowing this phrase from the discipline of cognitive behavioral therapy, where cognitive distortions are thought patterns that cause people to view reality in inaccurate — usually negative — ways.

Personally, I’ve found that simple recognition of which cognitive distortions exist has been illuminating in helping me begin to tackle them. So, I’m hopeful that you, especially those from the MD+ community, may resonate with some of the ones I’ve outlined here. To continue striving towards making our community accessible and welcoming, I wanted to get real. I see this article as hopefully being helpful to folks who perhaps are in temporary ruts and need an empathetic boost (facilitated by some memes)!

I’ve also described my personal approaches to these cognitive distortions, which are likely different from other folks’ approaches, so this article is not geared at providing advice per se but rather sharing my thoughts. The take-home exercise from this…

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MDplus
MDplus

Published in MDplus

MD+ is a community of medical students and young physicians across the country pursuing interdisciplinary career paths that combine clinical medicine with healthcare innovation.

Lathan Liou
Lathan Liou

Written by Lathan Liou

Data Scientist at Merck. Tidyverse enthusiast and a neRd.

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