I enjoyed reading the article entitled “Closing the Quality Chasm in Health Care: The Role of Critical Reading” in the April 2005 issue of the ARCHIVES.1 I agree with much of what was stated in that article but thought it could have gone further.
My background has been in both private practice (21 years) and, more recently, in academic medicine (11 years). My interest in understanding adult learning theory was prompted by my becoming a teacher of medical students and residents when I went into academic medicine. However, as I looked back on my practice years, I realized that, for many years, my partners and I had struggled with how to become “lifelong learners.” In our practice in Charlottesville, Va, we invited speakers over the noon hour to talk to us, we attended Continuing Medical Education meetings, we published articles, some of us taught at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) 1 day a week, and we each read up to 12 journals a month, but we were not confident that our methods promoted optimal learning.