Becoming a health care professional

There are a lot of things that I am still trying to adjust to in PT school but the biggest one so far is so how to switch your mind from a patient's perspective to a clinician perspective.

I am used to being a patient and hating all of the health care workers I have so far encountered but now I have to look at every encounter with a patient from a clinician standpoint and that is very difficult. We are being taught not to engage in small talk for very long, since we have a lot of patients, we are also taught that we have to extract the important information in order to develop a treatment plan.

We are taught that we have to explain everything in simple language and not always report everything that we know. This final point has been the hardest to figure out how to do, since I have always found that I wanted to know all of my results and all of my problems that I have and I hated not knowing what the results of some tests mean but now, I can sort of understand that it is impossible to explain everything to a patient in a short period of time and expect them to understand. How can I expect my patients to understand medical information that has taken me 2 months to learn in a short 5 minutes?

It is a big dilemma that I am still trying to figure out but I quess that as health care professionals, we do have knowledge that others don't have and even though it is important for patients to understand the risks and benefits, it is impossible for them to understand everything since my poor brain after 2 months can barely understand all the information we are supposed to keep in mind when seeing a patient.