The Art of Diagnosis

Abstract

We analyzed the psychological process by which physicians solve complicated diagnostic problems, such as those posed in clinicopathological exercises. The challenge of differential diagnosis is to select the most probable cause of a patient's condition, yet the size of the problem, the nature of medical information, and the notorious inability of human beings to manipulate probabilities in their heads all conspire against the diagnostician to make it virtually impossible to employ Bayes' theorem in routine diagnosis.