" Intuition " – and clinical reasoning

Intuition is one of two main modes of thinking, according to Daniel Kahneman. Intuition is fast, considers the whole rather than components of the whole, and intuition feels effortless. Intuition can also be wrong – but often isn’t (Gruppen, Woolliscroft & Wolf, 1988). We use intuition well when we’ve been exposed to many examples of the phenomenon under consideration – for example, if we’ve seen a lot of patients with similar health problems. We don’t use intuition well when we buy into biases or stereotypes. The alternative to intuition is slower thinking, that typically breaks the considerations into smaller pieces, often following a linear process where data (information) is collected and assembled. This kind of thinking is reasonably easy to investigate, whereas intuition is much more difficult to study (it’s fast, people can’t describe how they arrived at a conclusion, so it’s not amenable to self-report). Why worry about it? Well, intuition is the key strategy described by allied health, particularly physiotherapists, when considering whether a person needs further assessment for those pesky psychosocial factors (Man, Kumar, Jones & Edwards, 2019). What this means in practical terms is that a patient who doesn’t fit the stereotypical “risky yellow flags patient” may have to fail at conventional treatment before being directed towards a multidisciplinary, or biopsychosocial, approac...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Assessment Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Occupational therapy Pain conditions Physiotherapy Professional topics Psychology intution Source Type: blogs