How Doctors Make Mistakes When They Think

The best-selling book, How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman was recently reviewed in Family Practice Management. The best thinking by docs requires that we must learn from our mistakes and failures by constantly revisiting and reworking medical “truths” that we have learned in our training. How many times have patients told me that they have reported to their conventional docs that an integrative therapy worked when standard medicine did not? The usual response is either that it must have been something else that caused you to get better or that your experience is interesting but I don’t have time to look into it further. All doctors should constantly be searching for new answers for their patients instead of categorizing them into inflexible protocols that may or may not be effective.
Contact www.aafp.org.fpm , May, 2008, pp. 31-36 or order the book, How Doctors Think, published by Houghton Mifflin, 2007.