Over the weekend I finally finished the book How Doctors Think (which will be on our inaugural GE reading list since it was recommended by someone in healthcare). The book is excellent and I’d highly recommend it if you’re into this sort of stuff, it’s basically a study of the cognitive biases of doctors.
Anyhow, I’ve got about half of it underlined and will probably write a few posts from those over the next few weeks, the first of which is this one.
One of the themes of the book is that a patient should help their doctor snap out of confirmation bias (“confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information”). The book suggests two simple questions to ask your doctor if you suspect this is what’s going on:
- What’s the worst thing this could be? “By asking that question, a patient, friend, or family member can slow down the doctor’s pace and help him think more broadly.”
- What body parts are near where I am having my symptom? This helps expand a conversation that might be stalled by pain in or around a chronic condition for example. By thinking about the nearby organs a doctor might be pushed to ask some new questions.
In telling Benjamin about this we got to thinking about how we could turn these questions/answers into little applications, maybe even for the phone, so you can take them with you and be armed with questions to ask your doctor.
