When the Patient Is a Prompt

What recent research reveals about the strengths and limits of synthetic clinical scenarios

There is a particular kind of academic task that consumes far more hours than any of us would willingly admit, and writing a clinical case scenario from scratch is high on that list. You sit there on a quiet afternoon, trying to make a fictional 65-year-old’s symptoms add up neatly to a teachable diagnosis whilst not being so obvious that the third-year…