Teaching medical learners to appreciate “difficult” patients.

During their training, medical students and residents will meet many types of patients, and not all of them will be easy to deal with. Some will be dependent, self-destructive, vague, or noncompliant. Each time our learners meet these patients, they will experience their own range of emotions, from anger to frustration to uncertainty. As teachers and experienced clinicians, we often take for granted that patients can be argumentative—at times even hostile—and that part of our job is learning how to effectively work with “difficult” patients.1-3 The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for teaching medical learners how to better appreciate the difficult patients they encounter by offering tools that will allow them not only to survive these visits, but to thrive in them.