| med. |
When searching for an explanation, you should always consider obvious possibilities before thinking about more unlikely options. (One of the things that they teach new physicians is the phrase "When you hear hoofs, think horse, not zebra." The principle is quite simple — the odds are the patient has the more common diagnosis than a rare, improbable one. A simple but illustrative example would be the following (stolen from a physician family member):
An adolescent female patient presents with a three-week history of headache, fatigue, and intermittent fevers but was historically healthy. The physical exam was unremarkable and aside from the occasional fevers, the only symptom of note was that she was pale in color. The zebra could have been meningitis or a brain tumor — and the inexperienced practitioner would order thousands of dollars of tests and subject the patient to multiple procedures. But a routine blood count showed that she was simply anemic — the horse — and just needed extra iron. The rule: Think horse without ruling out zebras.  harvard.edu Elena_afina) |
