Teaching Clinical Medicine by Iterative Hypothesis Testing

To the Editor: I agree with Dr. Kassirer's Sounding Board article (Oct. 13 issue) 1 that iterative hypothesis testing is a useful educational tool. However, I would like to comment on two aspects of this method. Since the students are attempting to obtain information about the case under discussion, I think it is important to limit the questioning to one aspect of patient evaluation at a time. For instance, the first set of questions may be limited to the patient's history, the second set of questions to the physical examination, and the third to the results of laboratory studies. If questioning . . . No extract is available for articles shorter than 400 words.