Being a patient party.

A a medical student, we spend many hours of our clinical teaching asking questions during history taking and examining the patient. When we go to wards, we scan the cardex and nd out the new cases that we have. This is contrary to the ideal way suggested by our professors of going to a new patient and asking history. In the next minute what we do is, we go in, introduce ourselves and ask questions under the headings of the history. This usually pertains to the diagnosis we already knew and few other differential diagnoses. Finally we say “thank you” and walk away swiftly from the patient amongst the bunch of non history takers wondering what’s going to be the questions asked during the case presentation (this is the usual case scenario but not always).