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INTRODUCTIONInterpersonal skills are becoming more and more a necessity in the medical profession. The expectation from health care professionals is beyond just knowledge of the medical facts. To practice medicine effectively, doctors need to develop interpersonal skills in communication, leadership, management, teaching and time management. All of these are vital tools and are becoming increasingly essential subjects in teaching both undergraduate students and postgraduate doctors. However, a degree of self-motivation and personal initiative is needed to develop these skills. In this article, I will give an overview on interpersonal skills and will be follow this by a series of articles, in future issues, dealing with these skills.

Compression (or crushing) is used to induce nerve injury in test rats to study nerve degeneration and regeneration. The compression forces could be applied using a variety of techniques developed by several investigators. The lack of precise control of the applied compression may be the source of significant variations among observations. In this study, a Mosquito and dressing forceps were used. The Mosquito forceps was calibrated to determine the tip load corresponding to the clamping position. The dressing forceps was modified, instrumented with strain gauges and calibrated to directly measure the force applied at its tip. These two forceps were used to induce known and controlled nerve compression in 75 male Wistar rats (280-300g). The applied forces were of the order of 40N and 20N, for the Mosquito and dressing forceps, respectively.