The Mentor Search Trap

My mentor couldn't share a video.

A simple surgical exposure video. Another surgeon had asked for it—we were visiting his hospital, and he wanted to learn my mentor's approach. A reasonable request between colleagues. I asked my mentor several times over the following weeks. "Shall I send it to him?" The answer was always delayed. A dodge. A vague promise to get to it later.

When we finally returned to that hospital months later, the surgeon asked directly: "Doctor, did you get me the video?" My mentor looked him in the eye and said, very casually, "Oh, I just forgot."

He hadn't forgotten. He'd been deliberately avoiding it the entire time. I had watched him do it.

I felt something break inside me that day. Not anger—something worse. Disappointment. Here was someone I held in such high esteem, failing at something so small and silly. A video. An exposure technique he'd done a thousand times. What was he protecting? What was he afraid of losing?

That was the moment I stopped believing in the mentor myth.

All my life I'd been looking for a mentor. Like most of you, I looked to the consultants I worked with—that was the natural evolution. You watch them operate. You probe them with questions. You absorb their answers and let them mould your clinical judgment, your technique, your approach to recovery.

And in transmitting surgical knowledge, my mentors were extraordinary. They could teach you how to handle a patient once the patient became a patient. They could walk you through the anatomy, the approach, the precise moment when the tissue gave way and the hardware found its home.

But there were entire territories they couldn't enter.

When a complication happened, what did you do with the mental turmoil? When the guilt crept in at 3 AM, who taught you to handle that? When a medico-legal case threatened your career, where was the wisdom for that? These questions hung in the air, unasked and unanswered, because the stance was always the same: the senior consultant was always correct. There was no room for being wrong. No room for uncertainty. No room for the truth.

I remember one consultant standing on stage at a conference, declaring with complete confidence: "I've done thousands of these cases. I've never had a complication." A visiting fellow—younger, braver—stood up and said, "It can't be possible that you've never had a complication. There had to be one. You've just missed it." My consultant got defensive, turned it into an East versus West attack. But the fellow was right. In Indian private practice, when there's a complication, the patient doesn't come back to you—they go to the surgeon next door. You never see the failure. You never learn from it. You maintain the illusion of perfection while your actual complication rate remains invisible.

This is the false camaraderie of medicine. Seniors who never make mistakes. Consultants who are always right. And juniors who are conditioned to believe that somewhere out there is a perfect mentor who will hand them the keys to the kingdom.

Nobody's coming.