Who can do without patients?

and reasoning skills, and for professional identity formation and professional behaviour. Clinical diagnostic decisionmaking is primarily based on pattern recognition [6], which requires extensive experience with patients. The more the better. Many valid illness scripts in the long-term memory of clinicians are needed to adequately recognize patterns or stimulate analytic reasoning. It has long been recognized that an adequate history is associated with better diagnosis and management than tests [7]. In education, seeing patients is one, but an experienced educator and role model is needed to help turn this seeing into deliberate practice [8]. Longitudinal clerkships may restore continuity in both patient care and clinical teaching [9] if we may use this word teaching to signify the variety of activities of committed clinician educators, including role modelling, coaching, stimulating reflection and allocating learning opportunities to match the student’s developmental level [10]. Elder et al. recently mapped a road back to the bedside [11], or should we say, back to having clinical teachers, learners and patients together discuss medicine?