Errors in Clinical Reasoning

Physicians make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions at every moment in their daily lives. Quality of care and patient outcomes, including sometimes distinction between life and death, come out of such decisions. In most cases, physicians' judgments are correct, but of course, they also fail. Errors, in fact, occur in medicine, and the Institute of Medicine's well-known report To Err Is Human recently called the public's and professionals' attention to this reality. Since then, the frequency and impact of adverse patient effects provoked by medical errors have been increasingly recognized. In the United States, it is estimated that medical errors result in 44,000 to 98,000 unnecessary deaths and around 1 million injuries each year. Even considering the lower estimate, deaths due to adverse events resulting from ...