Wise doctors: What can they teach us about flourishing?
Summary: This article makes the case that the study of wisdom in relation to medicine is the ultimate continuing professional development. It re-orientates the medical education focus of obtaining knowledge, to focussing on practical wisdom (Aristotelian notion of Phronesis); where different sources of knowledge are considered in context, adjudicating where values conflict, equipping with the skills to deal with uncertainty, all with a moral underpinning.
The article introduces PhD research that sought to look at the biographies of empirically derived wisdom exemplars. 211 family medicine clinicians completed the Ardelt 3D wisdom scale. The clinicians with a high criterion for wisdom were chosen to proceed to biographic narrative interview (16). These interviews enabled the clinician’s life narrative to unfold. Four of the 16 character statements are presented in this article along with the common themes from all 16 narratives. A conceptual framework of how these doctors think was devised based on word frequency (Ant Conc). The article concluded with some positive feedback from trainee family medicine doctors who experienced a teaching session based on the exemplar character statements.