Medical education
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For doctors, curiosity is fundamental to understanding each patient's unique experience of illness, building respectful relationships with patients, deepening self-awareness, supporting clinical reasoning, avoiding premature closure and encouraging lifelong learning. Yet, curiosity has received limited attention in medical education and research, and studies from the fields of cognitive psychology and education suggest that common practices in medical education may inadvertently suppress curiosity. ⋯ Curiosity, inquisitiveness and related habits of mind can be supported in medical education through specific, evidence-based instructional approaches. Medical educators should balance the teaching of facts, techniques and protocols with approaches that help students cultivate and sustain curiosity and wonder in the context-rich, often ambiguous world of clinical medicine.