 Physicians have no restrictions. As a doctor, you are basically functioning as a pilot. You help guide everyone to their destination, trying to assure safe and efficient patient care. But there are a lot of people that help you reach that goal, which is why everyone on your team has a voice and every voice matters. Welcome everybody back to the channel. For those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael A.K.A. Dr. Chleney and I am a board certified diagnostic and interventional radiologist in New Jersey. And today we are back at it again with yet another article. This time talking about the similarities between the airline industry and medicine. Now, this isn't exactly the first time I've seen this comparison since there are so many similarities in our respective fields. However, this article was especially good at pointing out 10 similarities. So as always, I'll analyze the article, give my little sprinkles of wisdom and let's go ahead and get on into it. Let's go. We are ready to go. First, I wanted to give credit to the author of this article, Dr. Mark Bronstein. And as always, I will provide a link to this article down below in the description. So let's go ahead and jump into the first way how medicine and the airline industries are similar. Number one, the ability of the crew to manage resources. The reason commercial flying is so safe is because the pilots have a ton of information at their fingertips in the event of an emergency. The flight crew also has the ability to use all of this information as well, which essentially makes both parties equal. So how is this similar to medicine exactly? The input of say, the medical students is just as important as everyone else, regardless of their range. It is important to hear everybody's voice because everybody has a different vantage point. The author of this article gives the example of an engine fire. The flight attendant clearly have a better vantage point of the engine fire because they are in the cabin and can actually see it. And therefore, their opinion on the engine fire matters substantially. And the pilot relies on their information to know about the engine fire. Similarly, medical students have and spend more time with patients than doctors do. So they may know the patient's habits better than the doctor and know when something's wrong, which is why their voice matters just as much as the next person. Number two, the second similarity between medicine and the airline industry. Both fields are driven by customer service. I think it's safe to say that there have been a few interesting things happening on airlines over the last two years during the pandemic. And as anyone knows, it's near and possible to please everybody. And the same things that happen on the planes also happen in the hospitals. People storm out of the hospital. They act violently. They wanna check out against medical advice. However, as healthcare workers and also an aviation crew, we still have to maintain our professional composure. And as the author states, our goal is to improve health, change the lives of others for the better and overcome some socioeconomic barriers that lead to healthcare disparities. But as medicine continues to grow and become more and more complex and challenges treating and managing patients will continue to present themselves, this ultimately means that patients slash passengers will ultimately be upset at something. But we must be respectful, be professional and do our best. Number three, healthcare and flying are both redundant, which is a good thing. Flying is safer nowadays due to multiple redundant systems. For instance, you don't have just one pilot, you have two. You don't just have one engine on commercial airlines. Well, most of them, you have two. You have an auxiliary or a backup power and medicine is no different. We have checklists in place to ensure patient safety. For example, before any procedure I do, I do a timeout. Usually the nurse checks the patient's name, date of birth and any important lab data. We talked about the procedure and a whole bunch of other stuff. We also have co signatures for certain medications which may or may not have been a thing at certain hospitals linked up here. There are warning notifications in the electronic medical records and other staff letting over orders like nurses and pharmacists. This is all in place to have the system be redundant and hopefully prevent errors. Now, like anything, these systems in place don't prevent all errors, but a lot of errors are prevented this way. Number four, medicine and the airline industry use very expensive tools. I think it goes without saying that commercial airliners are exorbitantly expensive. In fact, the average cost of a commercial airline is 89.1 million to 112.5 million and that's for one of the most popular Boeing commercial airplanes. And in medicine, we also have expensive tools that aren't as expensive as aircraft but expensive nonetheless. We do robotic surgeries, perform genetic therapies and have advanced machines like proton beam radiation and MRIs, which is great because the medicine and airline industries are on the forefront of technology. Number five, we both work in teams. I know I kind of alluded to this prior, but I think everybody knows that there are teams behind both flying commercial airlines and medicine. The pilots may do the actual flying but getting to the destination safely and efficiently is ultimately a team sport. It involves not only the pilot, but the ground crew, air traffic controllers and the flight attendants. And healthcare is no different as you probably know. Patient care is very much a multidisciplinary approach. As a medical example, someone with liver cancer may be followed by multiple different specialties and multiple different doctors. A medicine team may be managing the patient's care as their primary care provider. A hepatologist may be monitoring their liver function. A hepatic surgeon or interventional radiologist may offer procedural management and an oncologist or radiation oncologist may be providing radiation or TMO. And guess what? We all work together with one common goal which is treating the patient the best way possible. Managing patients is very challenging especially when they are complex. This is why we come together as a team and manage the patient together with communication being the ultimate key. Number six, checklists. And I kind of talked on this a little bit earlier. Pilots rely on their memory items and checklists to quickly identify a problem and troubleshoot. As a physician, I do the same thing. I always have a systemic approach to patient care just like almost every doctor does. The reason we do this is because it helps avoid mistakes, especially in the pre-procedure or pre-operative checklists. Like I mentioned before, I literally do checklists every single day before every single procedure with the timeout. The goal of this is to pick up any snafus before they happen rather than after the fact. And like I always say, I'd rather be proactive than reactive. Number seven, training and recertification. It takes many years to become a pilot and also many years of flight experience. Pilots are also required to get certified to fly certain aircrafts and certain size of aircrafts. And as you know from watching my channel or being in medicine yourself, it takes many years to become a physician and even more to subspecialize. Going a little further, you may actually need to be certified to do certain procedures within your subspecialty. For instance, if I wanted to deliver Yatrium 90 to a liver cancer patient, I would need to be trained or certified to do so. And let's not forget, we have a ton of real-world working experience becoming a physician, which is also known as residency and also pilots spend a lot of time in flight simulators. And we spend time in code simulators and we both have to stay up to date on all these skill sets. Number eight, getting sleep. Okay, so I think this is where pilots and doctors are not so similar. Pilots are required to be well rested and have flight hour restrictions. Physicians have no restrictions. We all know that a safer pilot or a safer physician is not one that is overworked or underslept. So why are physicians not restricted in the amount of hours that they can work? Is it because there's a shortage? Is it because we just love working long hours and getting no sleep? I don't know. We do have restrictions in residency requiring an average of 80 hours per week, but we don't have restrictions when it comes to being an attending physician. Why is that? And like I said, I really don't have an answer for this. Should we have restrictions just like pilots? Let me know in the comments below what you think. I never understood how it's unsafe to fly a plane with no sleep, but it's completely fine to operate on someone with no sleep. The ninth similarity between medicine and the airline industry is safety. Many of you all have heard about the Swiss cheese effect. What this basically means is that the air is kind of lined up perfectly to slip between the cracks or holes. And if these errors happen, they are dissected to ensure they don't happen again. And this happens in the event something goes wrong on an airplane, just like it happens in the event something goes wrong in the hospital. Some of you may have heard of the morbidity and mortality meetings that we have, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly where we go over certain cases and kind of talked about the management of that situation or patient to see if we could have done anything differently to learn for the future. The goal is to allow for consistent recording of patient errors in hopes to ensure better patient care going forward. Which again, linked to these two videos up here if you wanna talk about the just reporting in healthcare. I say that kind of ingest. The 10th and final similarity between flying and medicine is something the author calls healthy narcissism. The best doctors and pilots are the ones that take pride in their work. The ones that feel as if it is a calling as cliche as that sounds. The ones who are the best are the ones willing to take the bad parts of their job with the good parts of their job because they love it so much. Whatever it takes to make sure the patients and passengers are taken care of we don't have this of the challenges encountered in the process. Okay, so that is all 10. I'm curious to know what you all think about this comparison between pilots and physicians. Let me know in the comments. I'm sure I have some pilots alerting on this channel somewhere. Curious to see what you all think about it. As always, gently press that subscribe button, follow me on Instagram and TikTok if you don't already. And as always, I'll see you all on the next video. Bye.