ABSTRACT
Doctors cannot be good doctors if they know nothing about clinical diagnosis and have never practiced relevant technical skills. Arguably, superlative doctors combine medical or surgical knowledge with the right amount of humanity. Because doctors train and practice for years to learn their particular area of the human body, this necessary hyper-focus on medical or surgical knowledge and skills can obscure the living patient behind each diagnosis. Real-life clinical practice involves not only knowledge and skill but also imagination, as doctors must be able to place disease and associated management in the context of each particular patient’s experience. Seeing each diagnosis from the dual perspectives takes deliberate practice, as every doctor-patient interaction is unique. Successfully taking another’s perspective becomes easier through more accurately perceiving each otheru’s humanity through the visual, auditory, and emotion data available to us.
