How Doctors Think

How Doctors Think

Rating

8.0

The Pequod Review:

We all have intellectual biases and heuristics that lead to imperfect decision-making, and doctors are no different. In How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman explores the cognitive tendencies of physicians, with examples of specific situations where they can be led astray: why diagnoses are missed by some physicians (but not by others), why physicians often have an unjustifiable degree of certainty in their prognoses, and how pharmaceutical advertising exploits these biases. Groopman pitches this as a book for medical consumers (so that we know the questions to ask and improve the care we receive), but it also has significant broader applicability to human psychology.