Practical Pointers: Learning to 'see' in the clinician-patient relationship

Abstract

Medical education tends to praise or pay lip-service to the art of observation, while systematically teaching the science of technology. To the extent you were taught observation skills as clinicians, you may have learned how to listen and touch but not usually how to ‘see’ your patients and yourself. This paper considers how to see in the clinician–patient relationship, not merely in an optical sense but also to increase your perceptiveness. We suggest 10 strategies to enhance your ability to see. KEYWORDS: Observation, perception, visual, clinician–patient relationship