The Doctor-Patient Relationship, Physical Examination, and New Procedures

Abstract

Gene Stollerman, editor of Clinical Experience, would like to see continuing medical education designed to emphasize clinical skills.² He deplores the growing gap between medical technology and clinical skills, in which advice based on the interview and examination is replaced by the results of technical procedures. The development of clinical skills, he pointed out, enables physicians to obtain a better understanding of the patient’s problems and to gain confidence in their own ability to determine what technologic tool is required to substantiate the clinical findings and what consultations would be to the patient’s advantage. Learning about new tests and procedures, unfortunately, is much easier than discovering how better to examine a patient.

The relationship between doctor and patient partakes of a peculiar intimacy. It presupposes on the part of the physician not only knowledge of his fellow men but sympathy.… This aspect of the practice of medicine has been designated as the art; yet I wonder whether it should not, most properly, be called the essence.

Warfield T. Longcope¹