Clinical reasoning and decision making take place within a complicated conceptual framework. The purpose of this book is to identify and analyze components of this framework and to lay bare the processes of reasoning and inference that are (or can be) involved in arriving at and justifying clinical decisions. Reasoning in Medicine begins with a detailed fictional case history, presented in the form of a series of dramatized scenarios, that serves as a touchstone for the book's analytical concerns. The authors analyze, in turn, the acquisition and evaluation of clinically relevant data; inductive and deductive methods of using data to arrive at defensible clinical conclusions; the place of clinical medicine within the full realm of scientific hypotheses, laws, and theories; the concept, identification, and classification of disease; the concept of diagnosis and the nature of diagnostic reasoning; and clinical decision making from the standpoint of formal decision analysis. Clearly written and avoiding both jargon and unnecessary technical language, the book presumes no knowledge of philosophy, logic, or mathematics, and includes an extensive annotated bibliography. This is a work that should find a wide readership among physicians, physicians in training, nursing professionals, medicals sociologists, and philosophers of medicine and science.
About the Author: Daniel A. Albert, M.D. is Professor Medicine and Pediatrics and Chief of Rheumatology at the Dartmouth Institute of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. He has published numerous papers on rheumatologic disorders in adults and children, as well as articles on various conceptual issues in medicine and on the use of decision analysis in making diagnostic and management decisions. Ronald Munson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science and Medicine at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. In addition to articles on the philosophy of biology and medicine, his publications include Raising the Dead: Organ Transplants, Ethics, and Society, The Woman Who Decided to Die: Challenges and Choices at the Edges of Medicine, and Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Bioethics. His is also the author of the novels Nothing Human, Fan Mail, Night Vision, and The Harvard Game. Michael D. Resnik, Ph. D. is Emeritus University Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published numerous articles on logic and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as the books Frege and the Philosophy of Mathematics, Choices: An Introduction to Decision Theory, Mathematical Objects and Mathematical Knowledge, and Mathematics as a Science of Patterns.