As health care professionals, we commit ourselves to lifelong learning. In that quest, wise professionals know that our patients and their loved ones become our most important teachers.

In no uncertain terms my new patient, who also was a long-standing friend, challenged me and put me in my place as I continually urged her to change her previous antihypertensive medicines that just weren’t working. Finally closing the discussion as she declined to make a change, she said, “Larry, I am the professor of myself.”

The authors, both experienced clinicians, met to discuss multiple and diverse ways of knowing in the clinical setting. How do we know what we know? Can we tease out the lessons we have learned from our experience in a sufficiently creative way so that we can apply them to new clinical situations and nurture the next generations of nurses and physicians—and our colleagues—with those insights? This article is a record of that discussion.

A discussion moderated by Laurence A. Savett, M.D.

For most of my career as a physician, I had been involved in what I thought were ideal situations: nurses and physicians got along beautifully. A few years ago, I moderated a breakout session at a conference of nurses, where I heard stories of frustration and anger, lack of respect of one for the other, horror stories of nurse-physician interactions, some of which had an impact on patient care and professional satisfaction. That’s the background of this conversation, in which a respected nurse-educator and physician-educator address the dilemma and draw on their own experiences. More optimistically, they spoke in detail of important initiatives to enhance relationships between the two professions.

We began our discussion as I asked them to describe what experiences contributed to their interest in nurse-physician relationships.