The first thirty years of my life were about becoming a doctor. I grew up in a middle-class family in a safe neighborhood with good schools and steady routines. My parents valued hard work and education, and I learned early that if you studied, followed the rules, and kept your head down, good things would follow. Private Catholic elementary school, public high school, then college and medical school. Every step along the way reinforced the same habits. Work hard. Memorize. Perform. Success would follow. That formula worked. I graduated with honors, matched into my first choice residency in pediatrics, and started the career I had dreamed of. On paper, I had done everything right. I was a doctor. But the next thirty years taught me that being a doctor and being a physician are not the same thing.

The doctor knows. The physician learns.

Doctors are trained to know things. Diagnoses, medications, procedures, and protocols. I was good at that. For a long time, I thought that was the job. Then medicine began to undo me. I learned that you can work as hard as possible and still lose. You can be technically correct and still miss the point. You can know everything about a disease and still fail the person who has it. Being a doctor taught me knowledge. Becoming a physician has taught me humility.

Medicine as a mirror

I came to medicine with a narrow sense of what was “normal.” My family, my church, and my schooling shaped my worldview, but they also walled it off. I thought most people lived the way we did. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know. Over the years, medicine cracked that world open. I was suddenly caring for families whose languages, prayers, and traditions were completely new to me. Some coped by leaning hard into faith. I remember a mother on her knees, praying over her child just diagnosed with a brain tumor. Her husband, standing outside the room, explained that he couldn’t put off his business calls. Two parents, two very different ways of being present in the same crisis. Medicine taught me that both were real, and both needed space. I remember a Black father sitting in a hallway chair, his child wheezing in his arms, waiting longer than others to be seen. When I finally stepped in, I learned he was a senior official from Washington, had done everything to care for his child, and his child was very sick. That moment hit me hard. His position and power did not protect his child from the biases baked into the system. The staff judged and triaged his daughter differently from what they needed. I remember a child with cancer whose family had every possible financial resource. They assembled experts from across the country and chased the latest treatments. Still, they lost their child. Medicine has limits. Biology humbles us all. None of these moments made me enlightened. They just forced me to stop assuming I was right and start asking better questions.

Caring without judgment

One of the hardest lessons has been this: My job is not to judge. It is not to decide who is worthy of care or to measure whether their choices line up with mine. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to people who make mistakes. Tragedy does not wait for innocence, and illness does not sort by merit. Medicine strips away those illusions. I have seen wealthy families discover that money cannot bend science. I have seen families with little show a resilience that humbled me. In the end, my task is always the same: care for the person in front of me.

Bias and blind spots

That is easier said than done, because bias lives in all of us. When I was young, I thought bias was something obvious in other people. The racism in the news. The prejudice that lived in someone else’s words. What I didn’t see was my own blind spots. I made assumptions about families before they spoke. I judged people by how they dressed or how they reacted to me. I thought I was being objective. I wasn’t. Over time, patients and colleagues have exposed those blind spots. A father who mistrusted me because of what medicine had done to his community. A mother whose silence I mistook for indifference, when in truth it was deep cultural respect. A nurse who pointed out inequities before I could see them. Bias is part of being human. What matters is whether we can name it, face it, and ask what we might be missing.

Why fixing medicine feels broken

There is another truth I have learned in thirty years: Medicine attracts fixers. Administrators, consultants, investors, and policymakers, all eager to announce they can solve what ails us. And yet the problems keep growing. The trouble is that many of these fixes come from silos. They make sense from the outside looking in, but they don’t touch the realities at the bedside. An administrator who has never sat with a dying child decides what resources matter most. An investor who has never struggled to find a primary care doctor pours money into the wrong solution. A policymaker who has never waited eight hours in an emergency department designs a system they will never use and won’t help. Meanwhile, physicians and nurses burn out not only because of long hours, but because they are asked to keep patching holes while others spend fortunes fixing the wrong things. Burnout is not just exhaustion. It is the ache of watching resources go into branding campaigns while patients can’t afford their medications. It is the fatigue of caring for families who are drowning, while leadership debates whether the lifeboat should be painted blue or green.

Politics in the exam room

Politics shapes who has coverage, which drugs are affordable, and where hospitals get built. It creeps into the conversations we have with patients, who sometimes test our politics before they trust our advice. But politics rarely helps in the exam room. It blinds us to our blind spots. It tempts us toward certainty at the very moment when what we most need is humility. The truth is, care improves when I leave politics at the door and meet patients where they are.

The value of the team

One last lesson. Medicine is not a solo act. Yes, doctors are paid the most, but payment is not the same as value. A physician’s worth comes not from issuing orders, but from building a culture where everyone can thrive. The best outcomes I have seen come not from me making the right call, but from nurses, social workers, chaplains, therapists, techs, and residents all working together with a shared sense of purpose. A good doctor may make the right decision. A true physician makes sure the team feels valued enough to deliver care that lasts.

Thirty years later

I spent thirty years becoming a doctor. I have spent the next thirty years unlearning much of what I thought I knew and becoming a physician. What have I learned? That hard work does not guarantee outcomes. That race, culture, and religion shape every story. That bias lives in me as much as in anyone else. Politics often complicates more than it helps. That teams matter more than hierarchies. That money and meaning rarely align. That certainty is dangerous. That listening is more powerful than judging. And that burnout grows when we keep trying to fix the wrong problems. Most of all, I have learned that the patient in front of me is not a problem to be solved but a story to be understood.

Doctor or physician?

Doctors are trained. Physicians are formed. Doctors seek answers. Physicians call the question. Doctors treat disease. Physicians care for people. I trained to be a doctor. Over the years, I have become a physician. And I am still becoming one. That, I believe, is the work of a lifetime.

Mick Connors is a pediatric emergency physician.