You have to earn your cynicism.  That’s my rule.  Young pre-med and medical students, even some residents don’t have the same right to cyncism as the rest of us who have labored in emergency departments for years, for decades.  The same goes for nurses fresh on the job from training, and ward secretaries who so recently were high school kids.

It always troubles me when these people start working in our emergency departments and within a week are making snarky, toxic remarks about how stupid the patients can be, how ridiculous their complaints, how pointless their questions and how annoying their phone calls.  I agree.  All of those things are true.  But they don’t get to say it yet.

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Edwin Leap is an emergency physician who blogs at edwinleap.com and is the author of The Practice Test. This article originally appeared in Emergency Medicine News.