Medical Reasoning Essay

Reasoning is a key component in understanding medicine. It impacts the decision-making strategies used by doctors in their chosen medical field daily, whether it be routine check-ups, surgeries or serious accidents. Decision making is influenced by how people get to grips with the decision that they are being faced with and how they seek advice to help in that decision. In clinical reasoning the deciding factor is making the best choice; the best treatment for a patient, finding out the correct diagnosis and so on. (Higgs, p.93, 2008) Whereas in diagnostic reasoning doctors much determine what the best diagnoses may be, what is the most like diagnoses based on the knowledge that has been provided by test results and a patient’s medical history.

Their study found that three factors were involved in analysing medical diagnosis; firstly, the medical knowledge that is relative to disease and symptom complexes, secondly the symptoms that are presented by the patient and finally the complexes that are connected to decide on the final diagnosis. Doctors factor in the most likely diagnosis by calculating what conditions their patients are presenting and comparing these conditions under possible disease complexes. Similarly, to the research carried out by Ledley and Lusted (1959) Kassirer (1989) conducted a study proposing that there are three reasoning strategies used by medical professionals; probabilistic, causal and deterministic reasoning. Probabilistic reasoning relies on statistics where doctors would use the significance found in test results and clinical trials to distinguish which treatment is suitable for a patient. Casual reasoning is used when a doctor collects the health aspects such as diet, exercise, etc of a patient and uses the findings to verify a diagnosis. Deterministic reasoning takes a different approach, where a doctor would use a set of rules built from practice in their field such as recognising symptoms to assess a patient and recognize an accurate