Doctors May Guess Your Diagnosis and Why They May Be Wrong

This thread is all about heuristic clinical reasoning which means a doctor's mental shortcuts to come to a diagnosis. Heuristic is defined in Wikipedia as:Heuristic (/hjʉˈrɪstɨk/; Greek: "Εὑρίσκω", "find" or "discover") refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery that give a solution which is not guaranteed to be optimal. Where the exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution via mental shortcuts to ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, stereotyping, or common sense.In more precise terms, heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines. In medical practice there may be many reasons which encourage heuristic clinical reasoning such as emergent medical situations or general lack of time for detailed history taking and examinations, lack of resources including an important resource would be a patient who was able to give a medical history or a knowledgeable surrogate. Another factor promoting such reasoning is the expense or potential health hazard to the patient from a procedure which would be appropriate for a definite diagnosis. Finally,  physicians who are not fully educated in a particular specialty m...
Source: Bioethics Discussion Blog - Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Source Type: blogs