Ensuring and maintaining professionalism in medicine is essential, but there are many challenges to the traditional values and methods of achieving this. It is important for the specialty of rheumatology to highlight the importance of professionalism within training and clinical practice and to encourage ways of demonstrating this to patients, public, providers and politicians to gain confidence and avoid over-regulation. Professional attitudes, virtues and behaviour are key to providing the best standards of care for the large and growing number of people with musculoskeletal conditions, in particular, those that are long term. This is important not only for those who are directly in our care but also for those in the community, where the civic aspects of professionalism are central, by generally improving the standards of care through education and by raising priority. The tradition of knowing and working closely with our patients and their organisations is an important way of acquiring, maintaining and demonstrating professionalism within the specialty.