Importance Of Diagnostic Decision Making In Medicine

Diagnostic decision making in medicine involves a cognitive process. As a clinician/physician, their main task is to make sure to give reasoned decisions about their patients based on the available information. They start with internalizing sets of data and observation gathered from the patient, and then producing decisions and series of options. Most data are obtained from the history and physical examinations of the patients, usually these are efficients for making a diagnosis, but often, more information is required. In some cases, an urgent decision must be made, these processes need to fit sets of observations into a specific category (Al-Sayyari, 2007). Myers (1962) developed type indicator personality measure based on Jung (1923) theory

Problem solving research was initially aimed at describing reasoning by physicians to improve instuctions and as a process of testing hypotheses. Solutions to difficult diagnostic problems were found in hypothesis early in the diagnostic process ad use them for further collection of data (Elstein & Schwarz, 2002). Problem solving consists of four strategies; hypothesis testing,pattern recognition, specific instances, and general prototypes. The choice of strategy for diagnostic problem solving depends on the perceived difficulty of the case and on knowledge of content as well as strategy (Elstein & Schwarz, 2002). Decision making involves many information typically perceived and evaluated in order to produce the best single choice (Wickens et al., 2013). Availability is when people tend to overestimate the frequency of vivid or easily recalled events and to underestimate the frequency of events that are either very ordinary or difficult to recall as it refers to the ease which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind (Wickens et al., 2013). Representativeness refers to estimating the probability of disease by judging how similar a case is to a diagnostic category or prototype (Elstein & Schwarz, 2002). Bias, of course plays a role as well, confirmation bias describes a tendency for people to see