A Lyon Among Men: Handling Opportunities to Polish Your Radiology Game

The second half of medical school can resemble a roller coaster. As you go from one clinical rotation to the next, the quality of your experience soars, plummets, or fluctuates rapidly depending on your preceptors. That doesn’t just regard your acquisition of medical know-how. There can be plenty of ancillary stuff in the mix.

A departmental chairman emeritus was the best of my mentors. Alan Lyon, for any Brooklynites reading this, cut an imposing figure, looking to my eyes like a hybrid of Leslie Nielsen and Fred Gwynne (Lt. Frank Drebin from Police Squad! and Herman Munster if you needed the clues). Not only did he know his stuff as a seasoned cardiologist, he seemed to know everything else.

His non-clinical wisdom showed up as the occasion invited it. Most frequently, it came in response to misspoken words and phrases from his house staff and students. It was almost never a simple correction. Usually there was a brief explanation or vignette. That made it more memorable as well as interesting.

One example, off the top of my head, involved diabetes mellitus. You have probably heard the second word as “mel-EYE-tis” more often than not. He would advise that the spelling is more accurate: “mel-ih-tus.” He explained that “It is” is a suffix referring to inflammation whereas mellitus is a Latin word meaning “sweet.” It referenced an ancient observation that the urine of people with diabetics had higher sugar content.

These episodes were never harsh. They were always offered with kindness and humor. That was something of a feat since he often had to repeat himself: Folks don’t immediately correct their speech after decades of saying things the wrong way. He might have occasion to advise his team more than once during a rotation and, of course the next month, he would have a new cast of characters who had not heard his lessons before.

Of course, nobody likes getting things wrong and being corrected, especially when it is from a mentor one admires and wants to impress. Ego gets in the way, especially if one is in a profession like medicine where folks consider themselves to be smart. There is a certain instinct of “No, I’m not wrong” that gets in the way of accepting redirection.

House staff and med students wouldn’t typically sass their attending like that, even if his delivery had been less diplomatic than it was. I can’t say for sure that I ever saw him offering this wisdom to anybody else like nurses. Possibly he figured that doc trainees and docs-to-be were specifically there to learn from him, but nobody else had signed up for it so that was where he drew the line.

In addition to just doing his job of educating, he was helping the fledglings polish their presentation and come across, for lack of a better term, more doctorly. You can know every single medical factoid out there and have a lifetime of experience, but if you express it the wrong way, people might not appreciate you as much. Every mispronounced word and grammatical gaffe make you seem less capable.

Doing what he did involves a certain amount of “putting yourself out there.” As sure of your stuff as you might be, there is always the chance of embarrassment if someone comes up with a valid counterpoint. Alternately, not appreciating having been corrected, someone may react poorly and now you have to deal with it. It would, instead, be a path of least resistance to say nothing and let people go on committing their errors.

Accordingly, when you add this to the cocktail of wisdom, confidence, and patience, there was a strong dosage of charity. Doing what he did, there was little for him to gain other than the satisfaction of helping others improve themselves, and perhaps a modicum of gratitude from them. At the time, I wondered if I would ever have the same ingredients to pay it forward.

A few decades of living life and working at a profession can equip one to do what he did at least in terms of the wisdom and confidence. Patience and charity aren’t as sure things. A lot of the time, they depend on how folks around the wisdom sharer choose to receive it. The more of them who do it in good grace, the better the chances he or she will be inspired to do it.

Unfortunately, that grace can be hard to come by and the age of social media hasn’t been helpful in that regard. Spend enough time anonymized behind a screen and it becomes easier to retort to anything at all like a boor. A lot of folks who might otherwise have reached out with helpful hints about how to express things in the best possible way are less likely to bother.

That, unfortunately, includes pointers in the field of radiology, where most of what we do is ultimately reduced to verbiage. Dr. Lyon’s pointers on pronunciation might be less relevant to us when we are dictating reports, but we still have to talk about our findings sometimes, and choosing the right words and phrases is impactful, even in print.

I reiterate the “unfortunate” aspect of that because rads who poorly receive advice (or, indeed, spurn it) don’t just miss out on a chance to improve themselves then and there. They might permanently convince the wisdom sharer to never offer them another nugget again. Worse, they might sour the would-be generous individual on the whole prospect. Other rads who would have been more receptive might never get a chance at what he or she could have offered.

This doesn’t pertain to folks whose version of giving advice is the opposite number of someone like Dr. Lyon. Those who use the veil of “just giving advice” to belittle or browbeat can and should be told to buzz off.

Regarding the good ones, even if you are 100 percent convinced that someone is offering you faulty or useless advice, I would suggest not letting him or her know. If you can’t feign gratitude, at least have the decency to suppress your ingratitude. Say nothing if you have nothing nice to say. You will “do no harm” and possibly live up to an oath you took at some point.