Reasoning in Medicine

Clinical reasoning and decision making take place within a complicated conceptual framework. The purpose of this book is to identify and analyze components of this framework and to lay bare the processes of reasoning and inference that are (or can be) involved in arriving at and justifying clinical decisions. Reasoning in Medicine begins with a detailed fictional case history, presented in the form of a series of dramatized scenarios, that serves as a touchstone for the book's analytical concerns. The authors analyze, in turn, the acquisition and evaluation of clinically relevant data; inductive and deductive methods of using data to arrive at defensible clinical conclusions; the place of clinical medicine within the full realm of scientific hypotheses, laws, and theories; the concept, identification, and classification of disease; the concept of diagnosis and the nature of diagnostic reasoning; and clinical decision making from the standpoint of formal decision analysis. Clearly written and avoiding both jargon and unnecessary technical language, the book presumes no knowledge of philosophy, logic, or mathematics, and includes an extensive annotated bibliography. This is a work that should find a wide readership among physicians, physicians in training, nursing professionals, medicals sociologists, and philosophers of medicine and science.