Care and Feeding of the Medical Student

Abstract

Most medical school curricula emphasize disease and purely technical competence, but are still inadequate in preparing students to understand patients and their experience of illness. Attention to methods of clinical data collection and its evaluation and to the development of skills in observing and understanding the behavior and emotional needs of the sick is minor in many schools. Means to correct these deficiencies include the use of films and audiotapes for achieving skills in observation of human behavior; analysis of the physician's task to translate the patient's verbal account of his illness experience into the languages basic to medicine; the general clerkship as the medium for acquisition of clinical skills; and new approaches to medical ward rounds that emphasize the processes of data collection and evaluation and the professional behavior of the physician.