Clinical Decision Making Quotes

The politics have always been difficult in medicine. There is some truth in the way medical practice is portrayed in TV dramas.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

The term 'triage' normally means deciding who gets attention first.

What I learned from my work as a physician is that even with the most complicated patients, the most complicated problems, you've got to look hard to find every piece of data and evidence that you can to improve your decision-making. Medicine has taught me to be very much evidence-based and data-driven in making decisions.

Medical judgment can be taught - laboriously, in long periods of training - but it cannot be neatly handed over as the occasion demands it. It is the irreplaceable and untransferable contribution that the healer makes to the suffering individual who would be healed.

Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government.

The goal of having more and more information is really to better be able to predict what is your health outcome going to be.

To become comfortable with uncertainty is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.

Obviously it's always hard when you tell a patient you can't help them, because maybe it's a physical constraint with the surgery, but in regards to telling a patient that they're not realistic and they're not appropriate psychological candidates, we're pretty used to it.

If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

I'm opposed to Blue Cross telling me how to practice medicine. Or anybody else.

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.

When patients are admitted to hospital for elective surgery or non-urgent conditions, their vital signs are only monitored every four hours, unless they have been identified as being at high risk of deterioration.

I'm trying to become just more clinical in every situation, whether it's the final pass, the final shot, or whatever it is.

As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that the foundations of diagnosis and treatment were to take a detailed history and to perform a comprehensive clinical examination.

I'm an ER doctor, period. I look at a problem with a certain lens: very action-oriented, very results-oriented.

People think you go to doctors for their knowledge. You don't go to doctors for their knowledge. You go to doctors for their judgment, their instinct, what to do, how to make the right call.

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.

Let's all be more humble about the evidence behind medical advice but also respect the challenges to providing accessible lifestyle guidance.

The best doctors and the best hospitals in America, if they cannot get the patient information they need when they need it, it can lead to morbid consequences: Higher mortality.

I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.

Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.