How Doctors Think in a book with that title. Groopman describes mistakes he and his colleagues have made in diagnosis, attributing many to the standard list of ‘biases’ familiar to readers of behavioural economics. But most are in fact the result of excessive attention to prior probabilities – ‘he looked healthy when he walked into the surgery’, ‘there’s a lot of it about’, ‘most of my patients with symptom x have disease y’. The good doctor listens, tests, asks questions, and only then arrives at a provisional diagnosis, treading a fine line between correctly identifying the symptoms which
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