by Paul Sufka on January 11, 2012
I attended my third American College of Rheumatology Annual Meeting this past November in Chicago. Each year, prior to attending the biggest yearly meeting of rheumatologists in the world, I spend some time thinking about how to best optimize my limited time there.
The first two years I tried to make it to every lecture that I could, and heard some of the foremost experts in the field speak about many topics. Although I learned a ton of information doing this, I still had to ask if this was really the best use of my time.
My approach to attending large meetings has been much different since reading a post by author Seth Godin, who focuses readers on the important by asking you to think back to a conference a year prior and ask, “What do you remember?”
Seth brought up the point that all of these lectures are available online, and that the part of the meeting that we should focus on is the “engaged conversations.” In fact, because of changing part of focus to this at the Chicago meeting, I met a number of other rheumatologists and patients from around the globe, including Dr. Ronan Kavanagh, a rheumatologist from Ireland, who has also written that attending meetings is not just about sitting in lectures and how Twitter can be used to enhance your meeting experience.
With conferences getting bigger each year, and increasing numbers of lectures and other sessions available to attend, it is important to remember the one thing that you can do at a meeting that you can’t do anywhere else: meet with people. After I get home, in the comfort of my home or office, I can catch up on the lectures I missed.
Additional resource: KevinMD.com: How to use Twitter at your next medical conference
by Paul Sufka on January 2, 2012
“The extremes inform the mean, not vice-versa” – Timothy Ferriss
To the benefit of society, randomized controlled trials have formed the cornerstone of modern medical information. These types of trials have been instrumental in helping us characterize the best treatments for a number of diseases and conditions, improving healthcare quality overall. To make these studies applicable to the largest possible population, they are designed with very specific inclusion and exclusion criteria, which remove the atypical and extremes in order to formulate the best possible “average patient”.
However, in daily practice, a significant number of patients do not fit the criteria for being average. Despite not having a well-defined best therapy, these patients still need to be treated.
One of the most important parts of being a specialist in any field is knowing what to do when atypical or extreme situations arise. While the focus of most data available will be on the first, second, and third line therapies for the average patient, what really defines the experts among experts is knowing what to do in the most difficult situations.
This type of knowledge comes from three different sources. The first is experience, that for obvious reasons, takes years to develop. The second is by communicating with people with more expertise than yourself, which is made easier in the world of email and social media, but is still often limited to fairly specific questions.
The third option, which I find particularly high yield, is reading quality case reports and series in the literature. This portion of the literature allows you to actively seek out extreme situations and learn from them, which often have been written to summarize whatever data is available for guidance, often drawing on data from the more usual studies. As an added bonus, these articles usually end up being fairly interesting and memorable (or maybe just less likely to put you to sleep at your desk).
So, while it is always going to be important to keep up with the usual landmark trials in medicine, if you really want to separate yourself as an expert, you have to seek out the extremes.