Objectivity is one of medicine's most cherished ideals.

From the earliest days of training, we are taught to gather facts, interpret evidence, and make decisions based on clinical reasoning rather than personal feelings. We learn to recognize bias, avoid assumptions, and approach each patient with a clear and disciplined mind. The message is both explicit and implied: good physicians are objective physicians.

It is an important aspiration. It is also, I have come to believe, an impossible one.

The longer I practice medicine, the less convinced I become that true objectivity exists. Not because physicians are careless or incapable of critical thinking, but because we are human beings before we are clinicians. We do not enter the exam room as blank slates. We arrive carrying a lifetime of experiences that shape how we see the world and, inevitably, how we see our patients.

Every physician brings something into the room.

We bring our upbringing, our culture, our values, and our beliefs. We bring the lessons learned from patients who stayed with us long after the encounter ended. We bring our successes, our mistakes, and the moments that changed us. We bring the experiences of caring for aging parents, raising children, living through illness, navigating loss, and confronting our own uncertainty.

These experiences do not disappear when we put on a white coat.

Two physicians can evaluate the same patient, review the same history, and arrive at slightly different conclusions. We often explain these differences through training, expertise, or clinical style. Yet part of what separates us is the lens through which we interpret what we see.

The physician who has cared for a loved one with dementia may notice something different during a cognitive assessment. The physician who has lived with chronic illness may hear frustration differently when a patient describes years of unexplained symptoms. The psychiatrist who has experienced profound grief may recognize forms of suffering that once seemed abstract or unfamiliar.

None of this makes these physicians less competent. If anything, it may deepen their understanding.

Medicine often speaks about bias, and rightly so. Unrecognized bias can influence decisions in ways that are unfair and harmful. It deserves our attention and scrutiny.

But bias and perspective are not the same thing.

Bias narrows our view. Perspective can broaden it.

The goal should not be to eliminate every trace of our humanity from clinical practice. The goal should be to become aware of the ways it shapes our thinking. Self-awareness allows us to ask difficult questions of ourselves. Why does this patient frustrate me? Why am I drawn toward one explanation and not another? Why does this particular story affect me more than others? These questions are not signs of weakness. They are signs of reflection.

In psychiatry, we are taught that understanding ourselves is part of understanding our patients. While the language may differ, I suspect the same principle applies across every specialty. The physician's mind is one of the instruments through which care is delivered. Like any instrument, it functions best when we understand its strengths, limitations, and blind spots.

Perhaps this becomes more apparent with time.

Early in our careers, many of us believe that experience is primarily about acquiring knowledge. We study diseases, treatments, and guidelines. We accumulate facts and develop clinical judgment. These things matter enormously.

Yet something else happens as the years pass.

We become shaped by life itself.

We experience disappointment and joy. We witness suffering inside and outside the hospital. We lose people we love. We learn that certainty is often more fragile than we imagined. Gradually, these experiences influence the way we listen, the questions we ask, and the aspects of a patient's story that capture our attention.

I was reminded of this after the sudden death of my father.

When I returned to practice, I expected that my clinical work would remain largely unchanged. I was still the same psychiatrist, armed with the same training, experience, and knowledge. Yet I quickly realized that something had shifted.

Patients spoke about loss in ways I had heard countless times before, but now I found myself listening differently. I noticed the details that often follow a death but rarely appear in textbooks: the exhaustion of making decisions while grieving, the strange disorientation of returning to ordinary routines, the way absence can suddenly announce itself in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable day.

My understanding of grief had not changed because I had learned new diagnostic criteria. It had changed because I had lived through an experience that altered my perspective.

That realization was both humbling and instructive. It reminded me that clinical expertise is only one source of understanding. Life itself becomes a teacher, shaping the lens through which we encounter the people who come to us for care.

The physician I am today is not the physician I was ten years ago.

I know more medicine than I did then, but that is only part of the difference. Life has altered the lens through which I practice. Certain experiences have deepened my empathy. Others have challenged assumptions I once held. Some have taught me humility in places where I previously felt certain.

I suspect the same is true for many physicians.

Perhaps objectivity is not a destination we reach but an ideal we continue to pursue. We strive to ground our decisions in evidence, remain aware of our assumptions, and approach patients with fairness and curiosity. Yet we do so as human beings, not detached observers.

The myth is not that objectivity matters.

The myth is that any of us can stand entirely outside our own experience.

Every physician brings something into the room. The question is not whether that happens. The question is whether we are willing to recognize it.

In the end, our humanity is not separate from our practice of medicine. It is part of it. And perhaps the physicians who understand this best are not the ones who claim to be objective, but the ones who remain curious about the lens through which they see.

Devin Maya Wadhwa, MD, FRCPC is a psychiatrist practicing in Northern Ontario, Canada, and an Assistant Professor at NOSM University.