"I am the professor of myself": how our patients and their loved ones become our teachers and models.

As health care professionals, we commit ourselves to lifelong learning. In that quest, wise professionals know that our patients and their loved ones become our most important teachers. In no uncertain terms my new patient, who also was a long-standing friend, challenged me and put me in my place as I continually urged her to change her previous antihypertensive medicines that just weren't working. Finally closing the discussion as she declined to make a change, she said, "Larry, I am the professor of myself." I tell this story often. During the course of our first appointment, when my 90- year-old patient disagreed with me about whether to change her medication, she settled the argument with the words stated above. She had tried various drugs; none was especially effective, some made her feel worse, and she had become expert-the professor-on personal medical matters. In this succinct statement she declared, I'm no doctor, but I clearly know what drugs haven't worked or have given me unacceptable side effects and what's important to me at my age. At the same time, her stance told me where she was in her understanding of hypertension: that "feeling okay" was equivalent to "being okay," and that she was unaware that the risks of poorly controlled blood pressure were substantial for this woman who continued to be vital and engaged despite her age. In another moment in my practice, the wife of a 50-year-old patient, a man of long-standing surly demeanor who had insulin-dependent diabetes and was recovering from surgery in the hospital's intensive care unit, taught me another lesson. He was giving me an especially hard time in his wife's presence. I thought I knew him well enough to tell his wife as we leftthe room, "I guess Phil is being his usual contrary self." She corrected me, "He's having an insulin reaction." An immediately checked blood sugar confirmed her diagnosis, and he received the appropriate-and urgently needed-remedy, sugar. These and similar events challenged me to figure out in even more detail the nuances of the doctor (read "health care professional")-patient (read "patients and their loved ones") relationship and to enlarge my awareness of its potential for collaboration and professional growth. More recently, coauthors and physician/teachers Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband wrote that ". . . Sir William Osler, an eminent physician of the last century . . . said that when trying to unravel a complex medical diagnosis, you should listen carefully to the patient, because he is telling you the answer" (Groopman & Hartzband, 2011, p. 7). And one of my students once wisely observed, "The interaction between physician and patient is the interaction between a generalist and a specialist: the doctor is the generalist, and the patient, the specialist." From these stories and many more, I have grown. I have recognized that collaboration is essential to any health care practice; that the product of genuine collaboration is professional growth, learning, and maturing; and that our most important teachers are often our patients and their loved ones. These lessons are worthy of learning early in our careers and transmitting to them so that we encourage them to be ongoing collaborators in their care, along with the professionals- physicians, nurses, social workers, clergy, and therapists of all sorts. In this article, I detail how I teach-and model-these lessons. TEACHING COLLABORATION BY MODELING IT In an undergraduate course I have taught for nearly two decades entitled, "The Human Side of Medicine: Learning What It's Like to be a Patient and What It's Like to be a Physician," I devote one 2-hour session to the subject, "Medicine is a collaborative profession." During this session, we explore ways in which various professionals involved in the care of patients collaborate among themselves and with the patient and the patient's family. In front of the class, I interview a patient. …