Proficiency in the interchange of information. These are essential skills for clinical practitioners because of the large and varied number of people they must communicate with every day. The idea that doctors automatically learn communication through experience or that doctors are inherently either good or bad communicators is being largely abandoned. It is now widely believed that such skills can be taught to both students and doctors by a variety of professionals including doctors and specialists in communication skills as an important part of undergraduate as well as postgraduate and continuing medical education.