A word on Socratic Method:
Socrates and Plato, according to Wikipedia, taught that the soul is an immortal and all-knowing force that incarnates time and time again through the life and death cycle of the human form. Though the soul itself knows everything, it's for some reason wiped clear of this knowledge every time it's reincarnated, where we spend most of our lives trying to re-learn everything we'd forgotten before we die again. Therefore, Plato would say that there's no such thing as new knowledge, there's only the remembering of forgotten knowledge.
This is why Socrates refrained from lecturing directly. Instead, he would pick on a particular student and lead them down a series of questions until the student himself came up with the information of the lecture. By never lecturing directly, Socrates could say that he was only helping the student "remember" what he had always known.

I was first introduced to Socratic teaching during my three weeks in Trauma. Three times per week, the entire Trauma unit (up to 30 people, all various levels of students except a few attending) would chose a few patients to discuss and cram into the room beside each patient, where an attending would "teach." A student would present the case:

"Here we have Mr. John Doe, came in three days ago with a gun shot wound to the left flank, along the axillary line at the 9th intercostal space."

This usually means that today's lecture will be about the management of a patient with a gunshot wound to the left flank. That's what I got used to hearing for the first two years. Here, an attending would then ask the student to stop while he looks at somebody's name tag and says "Andrew, what are the structures we're worried about hitting when a bullet passes through the 9th intercostal space?"

OK, easy. Spleen, Stomach, Diaphragm, Lungs, Liver, Heart, and just about everything else depending on the angle.

"Very good, and how would you assess for injuries to these structures?"

Not so easy. Well, I guess I'd see if he's vomiting blood, we'd know it hit the stomach.

He wants me to say we'd rule out a major arterial bleed, then order a CT scan of the chest and abdomen. Instead of going straight there, the attending would then look at a resident and ask "What is the possibility that a gastric penetration would present with frank vomiting of bright red blood?"

That's a tough question, which is why it was given to a resident. However, we quickly learn that the answer to most of these is either 20-30% or 70-80% (unless it's less than 3% or greater than 97%), which the resident would chose and the attending would probably say "Almost. It's actually.." and then he might cite a recent meta-analysis of world data that came out with whatever figure he had in mind.

Then he'd turn back to me and ask "Let's say he's not vomiting blood on presentation. What would be your first concern?"

"Bleeding, I guess"

"And how do you assess for bleeding?"

"Hypotension?"

"You're right, if the patient had a very low blood pressure you may be inclined to think he was bleeding significantly. However, you will remember that 40% of your blood must be lost before you show signs of hypotension. How would we be able to tell if there was massive internal bleeding sooner than that?"

"CT scan?"

"Very good, that would tell us for sure whether he's bleeding, but you might not want to subject a patient to an hour-long CT scan if he's bleeding internally. Any other ideas?"

I'd have no idea, so he'd finally open it up to anybody to answer, and reward the answer with a direct line of questioning that would lead us to collectively lecture ourselves on bullet trauma to the flank, simultaneously easy enough for some med students to answer questions, with a few difficult statistics questions for the residents thrown in to disseminate the most modern protocols currently being developed in medicine.

In the meantime, he would talk us into coming up with the solution to a problem ourselves, instead of having it taught to us. If you can get over the embarassment of not knowing the answer to a question, it inspires confidence that you can, deep down, figure these things out even if you forgot the specific protocols. After all, coming up with your own protocols and decisions is the basis for every major profession out there, not only for doctors and lawyers for whom Socratic method is taught.

Anyway, it's a welcome change from 2 years of classroom education.

I've gone from fighting along the front lines of LA gang warfare to fighting on the front lines of the national obesity epidemic. In this upscale community hospital, highly trained professionals devote their days to stapling 2-3 stomachs a day, taking out the gall bladders that notoriously erupt in anybody who satisfies the 5 F's (Female, Fair, Fat, Fourty, Flatulent), and repairing the hernias of people whose insides are literally bursting out of the abdomen at the seems. The days of going elbow-deep into a dying man to pump his heart have been replaced by going elbow-deep into people who are so fat that elbow-deep barely penetrates their abdominal wall.

I'm on call tonight, and this being a level 2 Trauma center, we'll probably deal with some kind of minor trauma in the area. Fortunately, people tend to shoot themselves less in Pasadena than they do LA. More fortunately, the resident's lounge has a big plasma screen TV and a Nintendo Wii.

I had my last call night (a Saturday, no less) on the LA County Trauma service, where I got to wheel a dying 16 year old gang member on a gurney past a gauntlet of 20 members of his family and friends as they let out a virtual wall of wails and cries. I also provided a hand to squeeze for a screaming 20 year old kid who got hit over the head with a beer bottle and was getting the footlong, 2-inch deep laceration painfully debrided while he told me we totally reminded him of some reality TV show, Code Blue, and that he loved us... probably because we had just given him a milligram of Ativan... all the while having the two kids who drove into a tree while high on mushrooms giggling uncontrollably at us from their respective beds across the room.

...and now I'm at an upscale community hospital in Pasadena, where each patient gets their own hotel suite-style room with a view, and the surgeons listen to internet radio playing "Summer of 69" while cranking through the gastric bypasses and hernia repairs of the rich. Not bad for a scene change. I'll try to keep updated about this new assignment, if there's anything worth updating.

I just had a long talk with the wife and 21-year old kid of a man who I saw come into the ER half an hour after he crashed his motorcycle on the freeway, who's been in a coma for the past 5 days. I saw the case come in and recorded the vitals as they dropped in the ER to the point where I had to walk out for a second because I was convinced the man was dying. Somehow they managed to bring him back, even though he had spinal fluid coming out of the ears and nose, a flail chest (where enough ribs are broken in two places to create a movable part of the rib cage), and a double femur fracture and compound tib/fib. We've been fixing the rest of him, but he's been virtually brain dead since then and all the doctors have been doing their best to save the man while also doing their best to avoid the wife who's been at his bedside most of the time. The man's stabilizing, and we're pretty sure he's not coming back.
Yesterday I saw the wife at the bedside and I had some free time, so I went in to say hi. She's been really nice this whole time, albeit in some kind of traumatic psychosis, and had apparently been living in the hospital for the past 4 days. All I did was tell her again, slowly, what's been going on and then I just sat their and nodded for the next half hour as she talked and talked about miracles and how she's felt death before but doesn't feel death now, and how she's fully aware of the worst case (and most likely) scenario but would really rather the doctors stop being so negative and let her believe in her miracles. I didn't think she'd have that kind of perspective on things. So I told her the good news, that we really don't know much about what's going on in the brain (I didn't tell her that the CT scan showed a probable brainstem infarct, giving him virtually no chance of recovering, after all the Radiology read was "probable").
The Chaplain came by a little while later and I got a chance to speak to him before he went into the patient's room to pray at the bedside for him, and it turns out he also felt strongly about letting the wife believe in her miracle. Still, he as he walked into the patient's room to pray for him, he told me he was more worried for the wife.
In other sad news, we were the trauma team to try to save the victim of a pedestrian who got hit by a van that was being chased by cops (see local news story, at http://cbs2.com/carchase/Chase.Crash.Pedestrian.2.809710.html).

Sure beats taking a single-use toothbrush out of the rectum of a 15-year old jouvenile hall horrifically suicidal kid who wanted to take the scalpel out of the resident's pocket to slit his wrists because Freddy, the voice in his head, told him to do so because sticking the toothbrush into his ass isn't killing him fast enough.

can't say it isn't interesting work...