Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I suppose a perk of medicine is that I get in my good deed quota on a daily basis, while getting paid for it. I tried offering first aid to a lady lying in the middle of the street (and somehow also holding on to a wooden chair of unknown origin), but the local security shooed me away after confirming paramedics were enroute. I think she was drunk, concussed or both. I also hold open doors, and I gave a hot woman her expensive looking scarf back when it fell out of her bag.
(Her being hot had nothing to do with it, I'd have done it for anyone without an obvious, contagious dermatological illness)
Now that I note that you also asked about "greatest" good deeds, well, I did talk at least 3 people out of commiting suicide, outside of my capacity as a psychiatrist.
Yeah, as a doctor your day job is often going to qualify as "helping someone", at least by the prompt. Out of work examples would fit the bill, or times you went above and beyond for a patient, enough that you would want to brag about it to coworkers.
When I was a teenager, I suffered a bizarre injury to my eye. I had to take some kind of medicine to keep the pressure down, but I got the flu at the same time, and couldn't keep the medicine down. And the optomitrist who was taking care of me made freaking house calls. In his Porche, in the snow to come check on me, every day for a week, until he decided I needed surgery, and then he did the surgery.
It's been 25 years and my family still talks about the lengths that man went to to save my eye.
An optometrist helped diagnose me with an autoimmune disease. I had been having eye pain for a week or so, went to see a generalist who half-assedly assumed it was a bacterial conjunctivitis, prescribed me antibiotics which only made my eye feel worse. I looked for an emergency optometrist, the one that had appointments on shorter notice was in a small but fancy glasses store downtown. Went there, the optometrist checked my eye and she diagnosed it as a uveitis instead. Started me on steroid drops that helped, but then she asked me questions about stuff that seemed unrelated, like do I often get back pain. Is it at rest or from exercise that I get back pain. Indeed, I had been having back pain for years, that physiotherapist have been trying unsuccessfully to help me with.
Turns out having a uveitis was atypical at my age and in my condition, so she suspected there must have been more. She had me check with an ophtalmologist that specialises in uveitis, who then referred me to a rheumatologist and ayuup, I have ankylosing spondilitis.
Sure, the optometrist helped me by "merely" doing her job well, but to be honest she could have just treated the uveitis and I would never have thought that she had been negligent.
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