Medical Decision Making provides clinicians with a powerful framework for helping patients make decisions that increase the likelihood that they will have the outcomes that are most consistent with their preferences. This new edition provides a thorough understanding of the key decision making infrastructure of clinical practice and explains the principles of medical decision making both for individual patients and the wider health care arena. It shows how to make the best clinical decisions based on the available evidence and how to use clinical guidelines and decision support systems in electronic medical records to shape practice guidelines and policies. Medical Decision Making is a valuable resource for all experienced and learning clinicians who wish to fully understand and apply decision modelling, enhance their practice and improve patient outcomes. “There is little doubt that in the future many clinical analyses will be based on the methods described in Medical Decision Making, and the book provides a basis for a critical appraisal of such policies.” - Jerome P. Kassirer M.D., Distinguished Professor, Tufts University School of Medicine, US and Visiting Professor, Stanford Medical School, US

A guide for everyone involved in medical decision making to plot a clear course through complex and conflicting benefits and risks.

This popular reference facilitates diagnostic and therapeutic decision making for a wide range of common and often complex problems faced in outpatient and inpatient medicine. Comprehensive algorithmic decision trees guide you through more than 245 disorders organized by sign, symptom, problem, or laboratory abnormality. The brief text accompanying each algorithm explains the key steps of the decision making process, giving you the clear, clinical guidelines you need to successfully manage even your toughest cases. An algorithmic format makes it easy to apply the practical, decision-making approaches used by seasoned clinicians in daily practice. Comprehensive coverage of general and internal medicine helps you successfully diagnose and manage a full range of diseases and disorders related to women's health, emergency medicine, urology, behavioral medicine, pharmacology, and much more. A Table of Contents arranged by organ system helps you to quickly and easily zero in on the information you need. More than a dozen new topics focus on the key diseases and disorders encountered in daily practice. Fully updated decision trees guide you through the latest diagnostic and management guidelines.

Decision making is a key activity, perhaps the most important activity, in the practice of healthcare. Although physicians acquire a great deal of knowledge and specialised skills during their training and through their practice, it is in the exercise of clinical judgement and its application to individual patients that the outstanding physician is distinguished. This has become even more relevant as patients become increasingly welcomed as partners in a shared decision making process. This book translates the research and theory from the science of decision making into clinically useful tools and principles that can be applied by clinicians in the field. It considers issues of patient goals, uncertainty, judgement, choice, development of new information, and family and social concerns in healthcare. It helps to demystify decision theory by emphasizing concepts and clinical cases over mathematics and computation.

Decision making is the physician's major activity. Every day, in doctors' offices throughout the world, patients describe their symptoms and com plaints while doctors perform examinations, order tests, and, on the basis of these data, decide what is wrong and what should be done. Although the process may appear routine-even to the physicians in volved-each step in the sequence requires skilled clinical judgment. Physicians must decide: which symptoms are important, whether any laboratory tests should be done, how the various items of clinical data should be combined, and, finally, which of several treatments (including doing nothing) is indicated. Although much of the information used in clinical decision making is objective, the physician's values (a belief that pain relief is more important than potential addiction to pain-killing drugs, for example) and subjectivity are as much a part of the clinical process as the objective findings of laboratory tests. In recent years, both physicians and psychologists have come to realize that patient management decisions are not only subjective but also prob abilistic (although this is not always acknowledged overtly). When doc tors argue that an operation is fairly safe because it has a mortality rate of only 1 %, they are at least implicitly admitting that the outcome of their decision is based on probability.

Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product. Evidence-Based Emergency Medicine, a highly readable primer, will be the first book to teach EBM principles and their clinical application with the unique mindset and needs of the Emergency Medicine physician in mind This one-of-a-kind guide discusses the search, evaluation, and proper use of the literature of emergency medicine, from textbooks to trials and qualitative studies to systematic reviews. It reveals how and where to find the quality information needed when seconds count. Fully exploring medical decision making using cognitive psychology, Bayesian analysis and more, it shows how to apply the knowledge they provide to achieve superior diagnosis and management of ED patients. The avoidance of medical errors is emphasized through the precepts of critical thinking and heuristics.

Minimize risk for every surgery-bound patient with this concise, high-yield clinical reference “The accuracy and readability of this [book] is excellent... the writing style is appropriate, informative, and suitable for the primary care clinician. The topics are well researched [and] the clinical recommendations reflect the most current guidelines.”—Robert C. Lavender, MD, FACP “The editor and contributing authors are all highly credible authorities and experienced clinicians... This is an extremely well-written, evidence-based text that fills a real gap. It should be useful not only to its intended audience, but also to surgeons and surgical trainees who often provide the initial management of these situations in the absence of consultants.”—Doody’s Review Service With new surgical advances and innovations, more older, sicker, higher-risk patients are undergoing surgery. Expertly assessing and managing patients with comorbidities who are undergoing surgical procedures is an absolutely critical task today—and Decision Making in Perioperative Medicine: Clinical Pearls will ensure that you make the right decisions through every step of the process. Which risk calculator should you use? How long should you delay surgery after percutaneous coronary intervention? Should the patient continue taking aspirin? How long before surgery should you stop a direct-acting oral anticoagulant? Decision Making in Perioperative Medicine: Clinical Pearls answers your questions when it comes to perioperative care. Filled with algorithms, tables, and clinical pearls, this practical resource is organized into three sections: Key takeaways on preoperative evaluation, testing, anesthesia, and medication management Expert guidance on evaluating the effect of comorbidities on surgical outcome and providing strategies for medical optimization to minimize risk Review of common postoperative medical complications and treatment Whether you’re a hospitalist, internist, family physician, anesthesiologist, physician assistant, or nurse practitioner, Decision Making in Perioperative Medicine: Clinical Pearls provides the evidence-based information and insights you need to make sure every surgery-bound patient receives the quality of care and management they deserve.