1 . “Don’t get sick in July!”

This is a common concern in teaching hospitals in the U.S. It’s driven by the academic calendar: July is when the new interns, fresh out of medical school, start work. In other words, it’s when everyone is most ________. The theory is that this disadvantage leads to mistakes.

So is medical experience good or bad? Well, in most cases, your doctor’s experience is very helpful, allowing her to pick up on a(n) ________ symptom early in a disease process, when machines still can’t take a hand. She can also determine the right treatment when your condition falls outside of what is in the ________, where newbies get most of their ideas. For many medical treatments, there’s a direct connection between physician experience and your treating outcome.

In a variety of situations, though, experience can backfire. The reason is simple ________. Doctors are humans too and they ________ tricks of the mind—like believing that an ineffective treatment really works. In fact, entire fields of research are devoted to understanding why these errors of thought occur. They ________ from so-called cognitive prejudice that can mislead even ________ practitioners into making the wrong decisions.

Doctors are usually locked onto a diagnosis early and disregard new and ________ information. For example, a patient may be diagnosed with a quickly fatal cancer, but then ends up trying various herbal remedies and lives for 30 more years. Instead of analyzing the ________ diagnosis, the patient, and maybe even the doctor, may assume that the herbal remedies cured the cancer.

Also, some experienced doctors tend to believe evidence when it supports their previous opinion while subconsciously ignoring information opposing it. Let’s say your doctor is pretty certain you have ill digestion and orders a test to________ the suspicion, which produces negative result. But she treats you for ill digestion anyway because she was ________ with the prior diagnosis by experience.

In fact, there are clearly many benefits to having a highly experienced doctor, such as technical proficiency. But there may actually be some unexpected benefits to having a less-experienced one too. She may have a more up-to-date education, boundless energy and perhaps is less vulnerable to biases, freed from the same ________ for years.

To safeguard yourself as a patient, one thing you should always do is ________. It may not always be possible to determine that your doctor has met with an unconscious thinking ________. But asking questions does force your doctor to think twice and ________ her decision about your case.