#COVID19 - Thinking Like a Scientist vs Thinking Like a Doctor
There is a widespread belief still held among many medical practitioners and educators that the work of a doctor is much the same as the work of an applied scientist.
This is a myth and one that continues to cause confusion and holds back efforts to improve both medical education and practice.
This myth has a long history and is based on the unfounded assumption that diagnosing disease and devising a treatment plan is largely identical to testing a hypothesis in a laboratory study.
Such integration can better prepare students to master the practical rationality needed in professional practice such as medicine and in laboratories.
Different Goals
- The goals of the scientist and the doctor are not the same.
- A scientist is trying to establish some knowledge, some universal truth about the world we live in. In contrast, a doctor is trying to help a patient.
- There is a world of difference in these goals.
- It is true that a doctor may order a number of laboratory tests and find out scientific information about a patient, but this is more like the work of a detective rather than a scientist.
- Scientific thinking seeks knowledge that is timeless and universal.
- Scientific knowledge should be precise and reliable. It should be law-like and generalizable.
- Clinical reasoning seeks information that is timely and specific to this patient, in the here and now, and that will be in the best interests of this particular patient.
Doctors in the clinic do not meet with agents who evaluate their pain and take a rational stand upon what they want to have done with their biological processes, but with worried, help-seeking persons, who need care and understanding
We need to stop believing that clinical reasoning and judgment are the simplistic application of science and adopt an interdisciplinary approach to help us explore the complex ways in which clinicians make decisions in the real world and how we can teach this to students.
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