A Student's View of a Medical Teaching Exercise

Physicians are usually careful to explain the purpose and format of a teaching session when asking a patient to take part. Failure to do so when the patient is poorly educated or of a different cultural background may seriously disturb the patient and mislead the other participants. Consider the events at a recent neurology conference at a Boston teaching hospital. The resident began by describing the case of “a 52-year-old postmenopausal black woman with a history of breast cancer at age 46 treated by mastectomy and radiation.” She went on to say: A year ago the patient had back, leg…