Doctor's Gut Feeling or The Dominance of Stupidity

This an interesting study. I'm not convinced that the doctors gut feeling was as key as the parents awareness that the child's illness was different from previous ones they had observed. Taken from that standpoint, it demonstrates that doctors are too dismissive of parents, thus placing the child at greater risk - http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e6144


Of the 3369 children and young people assessed clinically as having a non-severe illness, six (0.2%) were subsequently admitted to hospital with a serious infection. Intuition that something was wrong despite the clinical assessment of non-severe illness substantially increased the risk of serious illness (likelihood ratio 25.5, 95% confidence interval 7.9 to 82.0) and acting on this gut feeling had the potential to prevent two of the six cases being missed (33%, 95% confidence interval 4.0% to 100%) at a cost of 44 false alarms (1.3%, 95% confidence interval 0.95% to 1.75%). The clinical features most strongly associated with gut feeling were the children’s overall response (drowsiness, no laughing), abnormal breathing, weight loss, and convulsions. The strongest contextual factor was the parents’ concern that the illness was different from their previous experience (odds ratio 36.3, 95% confidence interval 12.3 to 107).""

I agree that doctors should have greater intuitive skills and training as is evidenced in this study. That probably won't happen as intuition is dismissed in that field as unscientific, even though studies show it to be scientific and reproducible. Tweet