Some of my favorite professors in college always amazed me in their ability to say “I don’t know; let me get back to you on that one.” I had more than my fair share of professors who would give some long-winded response to a challenging question, and at the end you’d be no closer to the answer than you were at the beginning. I think doctors are even worse about this than professors are. They can’t not know the answers.

And I am sure a lot of patients expect their doctor to know all of the answers. They don’t want to see any sign of unsureness. They need confidence, even if it’s in the wrong thing. Yet in college, I learned that I got more from classes when the professors knew when they didn’t know something.

Well, I don’t know everything, either. My copy of the Internal Revenue Code is 9,500 pages, and that doesn’t count the regs and other authoritative literature. I do not know all of the answers. But I can get them. And I need to learn to forgive myself for those times when I have to look.