Dr. Steven Novella

You're not going to be a world expert in everything, but you could certainly be competent at everything.

That's a lot of freaking work.

You have to rely on the people who are hyper-specializing, who are specialists in this super narrow area.

I guess I've read every single one of the 200 studies on this topic.

You can't do that for the thousands of topics that there are.

So it's a pyramid, and that's by design, and it has to function that way.

Yeah, it's funny because I'm at the other end of the expert spectrum.

You're a general practitioner.

I was a sub-sub-specialist, right?

Neurologist and then headache specialist.

But when we do a consult, like we're at the receiving end of a consult, we're supposed to be educating the person who referred the patient to it.

We explain...

That's fading, though.

Well, I spent my career in an academic institution, and that absolutely colors my perspective.

Certainly within the academic institution where I work, that was the standard.

And that's what I was taught.

That's what I taught other people.

That's what we did.

You don't just say, I'm doing X, Y, Z. You say, this is why I'm doing that.

Right.