Clinical Reasoning: How Doctors Should Think

This book is about the basic cognitive skills necessary to be a doctor. The text goes through the entire patient treatment process, from interviewing the patient, performing a physical exam, making a differential diagnosis, and selecting tests and treatments - and you'll learn a better approach that emphasizes limiting cognitive mistakes which are a leading source of patient harm in healthcare. You will also learn in detail how to assess the scientific literature and discover which new studies are worthwhile and which ones we should ignore. This book provides a doctoring curriculum and does include exercises at the end of each chapter. It is designed to cover many of the subjects taught in a medical school doctoring course with foundational principles of communication, ethics, statistics, and many other topics - but from a fresh and clinically relevant, Bayesian perspective. The intended audience is anyone who diagnoses and treats medical conditions: physicians, medical residents and students, nurse practitioners, and physicians assistants. The second half of the book has a broader audience: anyone who produces, reads, or interprets scientific literature (of any sort). A Bayesian approach to assessing the value of scientific literature is introduced complete with necessary online calculators.