[Is there a role for clinical medicine in the threshold of the third millennium?]

The technological advances of the last decades favoured remarkable successes in the study and the treatment of diseases. On the other hand, it risks to take the physician away from the interpersonal relationship with the patient. This kind of relation should be grounded, most of all, on hearing and dialogue, on the practice of observation, semeiologic interpretation and clinical reasoning, as well as on fixed parameters, laboratory tests and instrumental investigation. To reduce this kind of risk and to return the physician of the twenty-first century all the peculiarities of the bonus sanandi peritus, the author hopes that medicine is going to become a "medicine of the person" again: a medicine that will always prefer the therapeutical alliance and the clinical mode of diagnostic procedures.