This online course is intended to equip medical students, health care professionals and starting doctors with essential communicating tools for a more successful medical history. Individuals with special interests in exploring medicine are encouraged to also join this course.

In this course I'll show you that by improving communication between doctors and patients, through relatively simple techniques, there can be a significant improvement in diagnosing illness, preventing complaints from patients, preventing medical error through cognitive errors and thus improving patient care.

The basis for this course is my more than 10 year experience as a medical doctor and internist combined with my experience as a medical teacher.

This course, through frequently encountered pearls of wisdom in medicine, will cover:

- the importance of a thorough medical history

- communicating techniques such as the use of silence and summarising

- the role of complaints in medicine

- how best to act on complaints

- common biases such as anchoring, confirmation bias, affective error, ascertainment bias and Maslows hammer that can lead to medical error

- possible remedies for systemic and personal biases

- the doorknob phenomenon

After this course (future)clinicians will be more aware of the true power of the story of the patient in getting to the right diagnosis.