Qualitative health research
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Active and sensitively managed patient involvement in medical education is vital in the drive toward the development of tomorrow's doctors' patient-centered professionalism. Bedside teaching encounters (BTE) involve clinicians, medical students, and patients, and comprise a formative and focused activity through which students learn both the "whats" and "hows" of physicianship. ⋯ Although patients sometimes participated as team members, even taking the role of director, they were commonly positioned in less active roles: as audience, nonperson, and prop. In this article we discuss critically this commonality across the BTEs: the patient role as passive object at the point at which the serious act of teaching physical examination begins, even when patients actively reject this passive role.