As mentioned, there are “presentations,” day-to-day brief summaries of patients you're following in the hospital or have just seen in clinic, and then there are “Presentations,” which are usually the student's “spotlight moment” to show their stuff and garner a good evaluation. A Presentation is usually a grandiose version of the first time you present the patient, summarizing their entire H&P, the differential of their presenting problem, and the workup yielding the final diagnosis. (For the ultimate examples of a case presentation, see the New England Journal of Medicine's “Case Records of the Massachusetts General Hospital” series – there's a case in almost every issue.) The Presentation may include a mini-lecture on a topic related to the patient's case. Sometimes the Presentation will not cover the H&P at all and will simply be the mini-lecture on a chosen topic.

When you give a specially prepared Presentation on a patient, here's a warning: The Presentation may not be on the subject you think it is. Both I and a classmate had experiences of preparing talks on special subjects related to our patients – in my case, various methods for imaging metastases in colon cancer patients, and in his case, drugs for treating PCP.

Both of us were horrified to find ourselves shanghaied by attendings who pimped us on aspects of the case we weren't prepared to talk about.