Pediatrics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Pediatrics, including details on child development, perinatal medicine, child health care.

Balancing certainty and uncertainty in clinical medicine.

Hayward R

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust, London, UK. haywar@gosh.nhs.uk

Nothing in clinical medicine is one hundred per cent certain. Part of a doctor's education involves learning how to cope with the anxiety that uncertainty in decisions affecting life and death inevitably produces. This paper examines: (1) the role of anxiety -- both rational and irrational -- in the provision of health care; (2) the effects of uncertainty upon the doctor-patient relationship; (3) the threat uncertainty poses to medical authority (and the assumption of infallibility that props it up); (4) the contribution of clinical uncertainty to the rising popularity of alternative therapies; and (5) the clash between the medical and the legal understanding of how certainty should be defined, particularly as it affects the paediatric community. It concludes by suggesting some strategies that might facilitate successful navigation between the opposing and ever-present forces of certainty and uncertainty.

Published 19 December 2005 in Dev Med Child Neurol, 48(1): 74-7.
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