“What if”—Trusting ȷudgment, not ȷust scans

Beardsell laments the rise of defensive medicine.1 I see this every day in clinical practice. From the very start of our careers, we are told to be “safe,” but safe has come to mean “leave nothing unchecked.” The result is a generation of doctors who reach for investigations before reasoning, because we have absorbed the lesson that a missed scan is more dangerous for our careers than a missed opportunity to trust our own judgment.What excites me about emergency medicine is its reliance on sharp thinking under pressure and the ability to weigh risk in real time. What unsettles me is how quickly that curiosity is replaced by fear. For juniors, the lesson is loud and clear: the greater danger is not overtesting but being the doctor whose name ends up in the complaint. That is the culture we inherit, and it risks hollowing out the very essence of our…