Teaching Professional Attitudes and Basic Clinical Skills to Medical Students

Book excerpt: This concise, easy to read title is designed for clinical teachers looking to refine their approach to teaching professional attitudes and basic skills to medical students. Doctors differ in values, training and practice setting, and eventually they adopt diverse approaches to patient interviewing, data collection and problem-solving. As a result, medical students may encounter significant differences in the clinical methods of their tutors. For example, some doctors encourage patients’ narratives by using open-ended questions while others favor closed-questions; and hospital- and community-based doctors may disagree on the value of the physical examination. Medical students may be puzzled by these differences and by controversies about issues, such as doctor-patient relations and the approaches to clinical reasoning. This handy title is intended to help tutors address many of these issues, and to provide an approach not only to teaching patient interviewing and the physical examination but to teaching some clinically relevant topics of the behavioral and social sciences that are so vital to developing an effective, well-rounded physician.