Читать книгу Clinical Reasoning in Veterinary Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 42

You may feel at times that being asked to assess each individual’s specific problem is a tedious exercise when the diagnosis is obvious, because you think you recognise the pattern of clinical signs. In some, indeed many, cases, depending on your level of experience, this will be absolutely true, whereas in other cases, you will be misled. However, the most important point that we will try to get across is that if you don’t ‘practice’ this structured problem‐based approach on relatively simple clinical cases, when you are faced with the complex cases, which you may be feeling frustrated and stressed about at present, you will not be able to apply problem‐based principles and as such will be still left floundering as pattern recognition and/or going fishing fail you.

It is also important to recognise that pattern recognition is a process of thinking that doesn’t require explicit teaching – it happens naturally, whereas developing a robust structured inductive approach does require explicit articulation and practice of the steps involved.

It is useful to remember that medical diagnoses are often based on the ‘balance of probabilities’ rather than having to be proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Striking the right balance between the diagnostic possibilities and judging what is important or likely and what is less important or less likely can be challenging and, of course, is very influenced by experience but also understanding and knowledge.