The black boxes of medical education.

Can’t you see them? They’re everywhere. When you start looking, you can’t help but notice them. There they are, huge important sections of teaching about patient management that we’ve locked away in a black box so we don’t have to think about them. We don’t think about the mechanisms or the workings, and we can clamber back onto the comfort zone of biology, like a safe island in a choppy sea of uncertainty. Some of our black boxes are black box referrals. These are where a solution to a problem slips away from the prescription pad or a set of simple instructions, but into another professional’s domain. We may be comfortable with referrals to other medical colleagues, but what goes on with the speech pathologist or family violence worker? The black box referral works to say: