Teaching the difficult interview in a required course on medical interviewing

A module dealing with the difficult patient interview is part of a required medical interviewing course for second-year students. Using a classification of difficult doctor-patient interactions, students identify what goes wrong during interviews with simulated patients and then learn techniques to remedy these problems in order to obtain reliable medical histories. Skills taught to the students include identifying the specific problem within an interview and recognizing and using their own feelings as information about the patient. Attitudes encouraged in students include recognizing that the source of the problem may be the patient, the interviewer, or both; that the physician rather than the patient may be the so-called "poor historian"; and that the goal of managing a difficult patient interview is not counseling but rather the acquisition of accurate and precise information.