Guest guest Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 Blank The New Yorker issue of 2007-01-29 Posted 2007-01-22 What's the trouble? How doctors think. by Jerome Groopman .... Medical education has not changed substantially since Pat Croskerry and I were trained. Students are still expected to assimilate large amounts of basic science and apply that knowledge as they are taught practical aspects of patient care. And young physicians still learn largely by observing more senior members of their field. ( " See one, do one, teach one " remains a guiding maxim at medical schools.) This approach produces confident and able physicians. Yet the ideal it implies, of the doctor as a dispassionate and rational actor, is misguided. As Tversky and Kahneman and other cognitive psychologists have shown, when people are confronted with uncertainty -- the situation of every doctor attempting to diagnose [or to treat] a patient -- they are susceptible to unconscious emotions and personal biases, and are more likely to make cognitive errors. Croskerry believes that the first step toward incorporating an awareness of heuristics and their liabilities into medical practice is to recognize that how doctors think can affect their success as much as how much they know, or how much experience they have. " Currently, in medical training, we fail to recognize the importance of critical thinking and critical reasoning, " Croskerry told me. " The implicit assumption in medicine is that we know how to think. But we don’t. " http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070129fa_fact_groopman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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