摘要：Authors' reply Helen M Shields,1 Nielsen Q Fernandez-Becker,2 Sarah N Flier,2 Byron P Vaughn,2 Melissa H Tukey,2 Stephen R Pelletier,3 Douglas A Horst21Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 2Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 3Center for Evaluation, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA We are happy to respond to the excellent comments in the Letter to the Editor by Arjun Menon, Rahul Menon, and Vishnou Mourougavelou, medical students at Imperial College, London, regarding our recently published article entitled “Volunteer Patients and Small Groups Contribute to Abdominal Examination’s Success”.1 We completely agree with Imperial College London’s routine practice of using “real patients” from the beginning of medical school for students to practice their physical examination skills. We would like to clarify and confirm that it is also our practice to use “real patients” for our Abdominal Examination Exercise. Our ability to recruit sufficient “real” volunteer patients each year for 43–46 small groups for the Abdominal Examination is the result of the popularity of this exercise with these patients.1 We have not had the difficulty in recruiting patients as noted by Bokken et al2 perhaps because all the patients came from the practices of the two Directors of the Abdominal Examination (HS and DH) who were committed to utilizing “real” patients. View the original article by Shields et al
