Recently, I asked a colleague about the quality of care her hospitalized mother was getting. \u201cWell, you can at least have a conversation with her doctor,\u201d\u009d she replied. Clearly this was a big relief.<\/p>\n
High-level skills like reflectiveness and empathy are an important part of medical education these days. That is all to the good, of course. But as I noted last May in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, medical schools may be underemphasizing a much simpler virtue: good manners.<\/p>\n
In the article, I described a common-sense method for spreading clinical courtesy that I call \u201cetiquette-based medicine,\u201d\u009d and I proposed a simple six-step checklist for doctors to follow when meeting a hospitalized patient for the first time….<\/p>\n