How Doctors Think They Think
30th August 2007
Read it. I’ve got this book on order and haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but this critique seems to be right on the money.
In How Doctors Think, doctors tell us how simply spending more time with patients, asking open-ended rather than close-ended questions, reading “body language,” including patients’ emotions in the picture, etc., improves their diagnostic ability. How much impact do these factors have on diagnostic ability? Do they actually have any impact at all? These questions place Groopman’s book on shaky ground, for his evidence consists primarily of unrepresentative and mostly irrelevant testimonials in which doctors describe various atypical diagnostic adventures they’ve had, and how they think they either emerged victorious or dropped the ball. The problem is, this does not tell us anything about how doctors think, only how they think they think.