GUT decision-making

Blog Post by Alan Schwartz, Associate Professor of Medical Education and Pediatrics, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine (reposted from Prof. Schwartz’s Making Medical Decisions blog)

I was recently at a workshop for National Science Foundation Principal Investigators focused on how to communicate research to the public and the media. One of the suggestions was to develop a three-word summary of the principle message of your research work. This is hard. After thinking about it for a while, though, I realized that medical decision science (at least as I practice it) is primarily about helping physicians and patients to do three key things:

• know your goals
• understand uncertainty
• pay attention to trade-offs