The patient who has been harmed by a physician’s mistake is unquestionably the first and most important victim. Nothing about a physician’s distress in making a mistake should diminish that fact.

But physicians can also suffer after serious adverse events, particularly when they believe they were responsible. This response has been called the Second Victim Phenomenon, or SVP.

No physician can pursue every conceivable possibility during every brief office encounter. Nor should they. Medicine requires judgment about which questions matter most.

But therein lies the dilemma: How does a physician remain efficient without allowing efficiency to become premature closure?

Medicine has changed enormously during my lifetime. We have better imaging, better laboratory tests, better treatments, and almost instantaneous access to a medical literature that once required hours in a library.

But no technology eliminates uncertainty.

Every physician has stories. Here's why I finally decided to tell mine.