Students need to be shown what to do rather than just be told, and acquiring a clinical skill entails its demonstration with subsequent supervised practice and feedback . Teaching patient interviewing necessitates supervision by clinical tutors who feel confident in demonstrating appropriate techniques, and comfortable in conducting group discussions. In an ideal situation, clinical tutors would address both biomedical and psychosocial problems . However, despite the acceptance of Engel’s biopsychosocial model, academic clinicians often lack the training, background, and inclination to act as teachers of BSS.

An alternative answer to the question “Who should teach medical students the clinically relevant aspects of the BSS?” is that both clinicians and social scientists should do so, as already reported by Rieker and Begun [16] and Priel and Rabinowitz [21]. However, Engel has warned that such combinations may unintentionally perpetuate the split between biomedical and psychosocial problems by implying that the latter are exclusive to the domain of social workers and psychiatrists rather than a part of the daily clinical practice of all physicians. Therefore, he argued, a crucial challenge for medical education was to identify, and assist in the training of, model teacher-clinicians .

Such training programs would foster the development of “social science-clinician” or “ethicist-clinician” teachers, and I propose inviting BSS faculty to assist in their training. As stated earlier, BSS scientists look at medicine from the outside, and much of the knowledge in the field of the sociology of health initially began within a tradition of critical attitudes to medicine. These attitudes may alienate medical students and faculty when expressed by outsiders. On the other hand, the clinical background of a social science-clinician or ethicist-clinician may make them more acceptable to medical students and faculty when discussing modifiable shortcomings of the medical profession in its delivery of health care.

Students appear to appreciate the importance of the BSS more during their clerkship rotations. Contrary to the negative attitudes of preclinical students to BSS lecture courses, students in the clinical clerkships have been reported to perceive positively physicians who stress the psychosocial aspects of medicine [22]. Therefore, the optimal timing for BSS instruction seems to be during the clinical methods course and during the clerkship rotations, rather than during the preclinical phase of the curriculum; and the optimal teaching approach is small-group discussions, rather than lectures and reading assignments.

During the small-group discussions, an effort should be made to avoid the critical attitude to medicine that has traditionally characterized BSS scientists. Students should be encouraged, preferably by medical doctors, to explore the biomedical and psychosocial aspects of a patient’s condition in an atmosphere of respect for the worth of both the biomedical and biopsychosocial models of clinical reasoning and with reflection on their merits and weaknesses. Rather than force feed medical students with lecture courses, faculty should make students discover for themselves the relevance of the BSS to clinical problem-solving. As I already stated in the introduction, I have found this approach useful in motivating students, and its implementation is described in Chaps. 5–7.