The guy who makes medical school easier – Dustyn Williams

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Once you actually start taking care of people,  you realize again why you did it in the first place. You will see people at their worst, at their best, and you are going to make people better. You will heal the sick, mend the wounded, and comfort the dying, there is no better mission than that.

Introduction

Dr. Williams is the Lead Educator and Founder of Online MedEd, Clerkship Director of Baton Rouge General Medical Center, and a teacher in the Baton Rouge Internal Medicine Residency Program.

Dustyn’s OnlineMed videos and notes have personally made it tremendously easier to go into clinical clerkship and shelf exams with more confidence. Thank you for what you do!

In this episode we dive into Dustyn’s work with Online MedEd, challenges along the medical journey, tips for education, life, and much more.

Please enjoy the episode and check out Online MedEd

 

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Sample of the conversation:

Can you describe a fulfilling moment in your medical career?

I used to volunteer at Bridgehouse, a clinic where recovering addicts would live, work, and live together. On Tuesdays we Tulane students would  go and act as physicians and fourth years led the clinic; first and second years were doing it as part of their community service hours. 

I heard a student who was a third year coaching a second year, with the drapes closed, and they were using one of my advanced organizers. They were coaching the  people below them the exact way I had coached it. I peered around the corner and I thought: “I’m pretty sure I didn’t teach this guy”, and it was word for word the way I did it. This is awesome! I taught someone, they are teaching someone else, and they are teaching someone else and someone else. The message just got propagated, and I hadn’t done anything yet. I was a fourth year medical student. It meant that other people were teaching others. That is really why I teach.

The Emotional Bank Account

I treat people like people and it has to do with the “emotional bank account”. You as an individual have an emotional battery and you give and take as you interact with people. It’s really easy to deposit into the bank account, [for example]just spending time to listen to the nurse and learning what beer he likes. It has nothing to do with patient care, in fact it’s kind of disruptive. But I listen anyways, because I put those deposits in. Then later, when I’m doing a procedure, the ultrasound is ready with the consents signed. Whereas, the jerk-off guy who treats everyone else like crap, has to go do it himself. The emotional bank account means when there’s a time you need to draw, it’s a shitty day, you get people to help you.

In the guide I talk about, if you blow off your best friend who you’ve known for twenty years for lunch, you just get lunch the next day. If you blow off a tinder date and you don’t show up to the bar, you aren’t going to get a second date. The idea is, you have twenty years of investment with your friend and two texts worth with this girl from tinder. So you need to treat your environment like your best friend. And yes big things count, but I think little things count more, like knowing someone just had a kid, or someone started school… know what’s important to them and go after it!

If you could redraw what medical school could be like, if you could redraw what residency training would be like, what would be your ideal system?

I don’t know if this is ideal but we have all this material on Online MedEd and we have Student-faculty mode. I think that medical school is ruthlessly inefficient in both cost and time. I think that the way medical education is going is not following what doctors need to become. I actually think the LCME and the ACGME have been doing a good job of what things need to happen. You need to learn how to work in systems, you need to be a great leader, and you need to know a bunch of stuff. That’s not all of the milestones, but becoming a physician is not just memorizing a bunch of things and remembering them all. And also, practicing medicine for the most part, can follow an algorithm. As long as you get the diagnosis right, you can follow. If the blood pressure isn’t right, follow this dose. If the diabetes isn’t controlled, go up by this much on their insulin. A lot of things can be automated.

So what I would like medical school to become is a training ground for amazing people to happen to know some stuff. And I justified medical school, particularly the clinical sciences, because I learned so much in the pre-clinical years preparing for a test I didn’t want to take, that now when I reencounter those things, it’s like second nature. But I don’t think that’s necessary. I think that an ideal education world, we would have, I think, just the same amount of time and we would use something like OnlineMed Ed to make learning what we need to know more efficient.

But then we would change the paradigm in which we train. We would do more stuff on leadership, more stuff on communication, more stuff on systems. Teaching physicians to be leaders, the captain of the ship, who manage huge teams of people and use those people as extensions of themselves. I don’t know how to do that specifically, and OnlineMed Ed is the piece we are using to make learning more efficient rather than PhD’s who are super obsessed with their one molecule for 55 minutes in the dark auditorium. Let the students learn what they need to learn on their own time, and then use the rest of the time to craft great people.

For more of the conversation, listen to the audio!