Introduction : The Challenge of Uncertainty in Medicine -- The Nature and Etiology of Uncertainty -- The Anatomy of Uncertainty -- The Natural History of Uncertainty -- The Management of Uncertainty -- A Way Forward : Systematizing Uncertainty Tolerance.

Uncertainty is the norm in medical practice, yet often gives rise to distress in clinicians, who fear they will make shameful or guilt inducing errors. This book offers a succinct method to clinicians for classifying uncertainty and finding the right skills to manage different types of uncertainty successfully. Every clinician experiences moments when 'they don't know what to do'. Modern medicine is increasingly complex and training has also become more complicated. The days of 'see one, do one, teach one' are over. Yet, both younger clinicians and senior practitioners describe uncertainty as one of the most challenging and stressful aspects of clinical work. If uncertainty is uncomfortable or threatening to individual practitioners, it also provides complex educational challenges. How can we learn to cope with uncertainty effectively ourselves? How can we teach others to understand and manage uncertainty? In this ground breaking book, the authors propose ways to cut through uncertainty, which is explored as an inevitable (and even desirable) component of clinical practice. A Map of Uncertainty in Medicine (MUM) is used to classify uncertainty and to define the skills that will help find a way though practical difficulties. It is always good to have your MUM with you in a tricky situation!

What makes a good doctor? It's not what you think. A doctor willing to face their own uncertainty in the face of illness and treatment might just be the best medicine. Too often we choose the wrong doctor for the wrong reasons. It doesn't have to be that way. In The Good Doctor, Ken Brigham, MD, and Michael M.E. Johns, MD, argue that we need to change the way we think about health care if we want to be the healthiest we can be. Counterintuitive as it may seem, uncertainty is integral to medicine, and you want a doctor who knows that: someone who sees you as the unique case you are, someone who knows that data isn't everything, someone who is able to change her mind as the information changes. For too long we've clung to the myth of the infallible doctor--one who assuredly tells us this is what's wrong and here is how I will cure you--and our health has suffered for it. Brigham and Johns propose a new model of medicine, one that is comfortable with ambiguity and that centers on an equal partnership between patient and doctor. Uncertainty, properly embraced, opens a new universe of possibilities.

The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is a site where hi-tech medicine and vulnerable human beings come into close contact. Focusing on a number of medical and ethical challenges encountered by staff and parents, this book provides a new perspective on the complexity of these treatments and the inventiveness of those involved.

This work provides a thought-provoking account of how medical treatments can be tested with unbiased or 'fair' trials and explains how patients can work with doctors to achieve this vital goal. It spans the gamut of therapy from mastectomy to thalidomide and explores a vast range of case studies.

For the past few years, the author, a renowned economist, has been applying the statistical tools of economics to decision making under uncertainty in the context of patient health status and response to treatment. He shows how statistical imprecision and identification problems affect empirical research in the patient-care sphere.

Essential, required reading for doctors and patients alike: A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the world’s premiere cancer researchers reveals an urgent philosophy on the little-known principles that govern medicine—and how understanding these principles can empower us all. Over a decade ago, when Siddhartha Mukherjee was a young, exhausted, and isolated medical resident, he discovered a book that would forever change the way he understood the medical profession. The book, The Youngest Science, forced Dr. Mukherjee to ask himself an urgent, fundamental question: Is medicine a “science”? Sciences must have laws—statements of truth based on repeated experiments that describe some universal attribute of nature. But does medicine have laws like other sciences? Dr. Mukherjee has spent his career pondering this question—a question that would ultimately produce some of most serious thinking he would do around the tenets of his discipline—culminating in The Laws of Medicine. In this important treatise, he investigates the most perplexing and illuminating cases of his career that ultimately led him to identify the three key principles that govern medicine. Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important book is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and Eureka! moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee’s signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical read, not just for those in the medical profession, but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being is being treated. Ultimately, this book lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding medicine, now and into the future.