It’s okay to not always have the answers

Transcript:

It is okay, even though you have all those degrees and letters behind your name, it’s still okay to learn from your patients and to say, “Hmm, you used this particular language to describe something, and I didn’t understand. Tell me more about that, so that I can understand.” Or, “What do you mean by that?”

Now some providers when I say that, they say, “Well, now the patient’s gonna ask me all these questions that I don’t know the answer to.” It’s okay not to always have the answers, but you have to be willing to go find out. And that takes some professional humility to say, “Hmm, you might need something I don’t know about. Let me find out about it, so that we can walk through this together.