Ed

How Doctors Think

Doctors, it turns out, are human. They can fall prey to the same cognitive errors the rest of us experience. Jerome Groopman devotes much of his book How Doctors Think to confirmation bias and search satisfaction: one being the cascade of errors stemming from an initial misdiagnosis, the other the lack of a necessary cascading, that is, halting your search when you've found one potential problem. (Programmers in the audience will be familiar with this temptation from doing code reviews. It's a common trap).

Groopman writes eloquently and compassionately about matters which can be delicate and inflammatory: medical errors. He provides copious real-world case studies, describing the facts in a warm--not clinical--voice, refraining from fingerpointing. He explores the causes of common mistakes and how doctors learn from them. He offers good advice for how patients (and family) should interact with their doctors. He recognizes that there will always be uncertainty, there will always be errors, not all of them human-induced. He offers ways for doctors to avoid common traps.

But ultimately I think he forgets the punchline to the old joke: "What do they call the guy who graduates at the bottom of his class in medical school?" (answer: "Doctor"). There is wide variation in ability. Some doctors will learn from his book; others already practice what he recommends; some may never get it. Ultimately the best beneficiary of How Doctors Think might be the patient: in providing insights into doctors' minds, Groopman helps us take better care of our own conditions.