Every patient encounter is a new experience to be added to the doctor's base of clinicianship. Every physician at the bedside is a clinical investigator seeking to obtain and analyze data to diagnose, treat, and assess the response to therapy by serial observations and interactions with the patient. We are also challenged by the necessity to convince health care systems to provide sufficient resources for diagnosis and treatment, to dispel misinformation about health care from multiple media sources. Back to top Physicians have an obligation to see themselves through the eyes of others, so that we can respond empathetically to patients and improve our abilities as physicians. We should continuously learn and improve by observation and reflection about our daily interactions with patients.
Communication is our core clinical skill that requires continuous honing to keep it sharp.
We must learn to recognize our emotional response to patients in order to prevent our dislike, anger, or discomfort from keeping us from doing the best for patients who have entrusted themselves to our care. The first quality of a skilled clinician is to follow a sound clinical training program with the lifelong self-discipline of persistent studenthood. We need to continue to question and search out answers to questions. The second quality is the ability to determine what is most important from what is least important and to do first things first. This perspective comes with increasing clinical experience and critical reflection and will allow you ultimately to see both the forest and the trees each for what they are.