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» Go to news mainMedia Highlight: A healthy dose of critical thinking
Posted Sunday by the Chronicle Herald:
When first-year medical students started their program at 窪蹋勛圖厙 last month, they got a dose of training unavailable to previous generations of doctors-to-be.
They received early instruction on a crucial component of a doctors modus operandi critical thinking.
Call it Decision Making 101.
Dalhousies freshman class of med students, like older medical trainees, need to be told how they think, Dr. Pat Croskerry said.
A patient-safety expert, Croskerry is an emergency medicine physician and the director of the critical thinking program at the universitys medical school. The program was established last year.
The thinking process delivered by our brains activity that produces judgment, analysis, intuition can also turn out biases, Croskerry said recently. That could lead to such counterproductive or harmful diagnostic side-effects as tunnel vision and medical errors.
Although doctors whove been working longer than those beginning their medical careers are likely to be correct more often than not, knowledgeable physicians are not infallible.
You see classic mistakes being made by experienced people in the medical profession and many other fields, Croskerry said.
At Dalhousie, critical thinking and decision making are now built into the med schools curriculum, he said. Decision making is even discussed during the first-year students orientation week.
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