The business about, going on slightly from there, about the... the consult and all this new work about education and communication does puzzle me a little bit. I mean, at the end of the day, when all this is said and done, I truly believe that there's a silent centre for medicine. And by that I mean there's a doctor and a patient into a room, trying to come to terms with what's going on and for the doctor to make the diagnosis and the patient to see what he's on about and the doctor see what the patient's on about. I mean, this of course is rich, Western medicine. This wouldn't be in a Darfur refugee camp and it wouldn't be in a rural clinic in Nigeria with 250 children outside where you need Morris King's famous four-minute consultation. You know, look at the mother, is the patient breathing... you know, sort of I can't remember all the four minutes. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant way of assessing a child's illness in four minutes and, and valid, but we're talking about this kind of medicine in a country like this and I just have this sort of puzzled sense, all these studies and all these trials and all these things about communication, video tapes and, and patients doing this and they're all sort of swirling round and round the silent centre and wondering – it's probably just being old – but wondering to what extent that all gets through to actually improve that silence centre and what goes on in it. And this is only a question, I haven't got a... an answer to it, but in a way I sometimes feel a lot of the work you see, especially the qualitative research work is to do with analysing what's happening without necessarily improving what's happening. It's obviously – its long-term intention is to do that. I don't know if I've been very obscure or, or muddled about that, but that's... that's what I... I ask myself and there are some things I've already said which I do think are clearly important, like teaching certain basic things about how you relate with patients and on the teaching side how you relate with students. That's for sure. It's just I don't know how much of it gets home.
