I was a philosophy minor in college because one aspect of philosophy appealed to me — logic. People unintentionally make logical fallacies nearly every day. That’s when you make decisions or argue a point with someone based upon an illogical assumption or relationship. For instance, in health and mental health research, many, many researchers and health reporters confuse cause and effect and often report a finding as though we know X causes Y, even when the research showed no such causative relationship.

So I was very happy to read an article in The Boston Globe today entitled, The mistakes doctors make by Dr. Jerome Groopman. Unfortunately, the online version of the article doesn’t have the informative graphic that accompanies the paper version. Dr. Groopman nicely illustrated a single case where fallacies in doctors’ reasoning led to a woman being misdiagnosed over and over again.

Why and how could this occur? Aren’t doctors taught to think logically and critically?

Well, it occurs for numerous reasons, but Dr. Groopman noted,

Physicians are rarely taught about pitfalls in cognition. During their training, they work as apprentices to senior doctors. They learn largely by doing. In today’s medical system, where there is intense pressure to see as many patients as possible, the quick judgment is often rewarded. Unfortunately, working in haste is a setup for errors in thinking.

Doctors (and therapists) don’t receive any formal education in logical fallacies. And call it laziness or human nature, but once a person has a diagnosis given by another professional (especially one given by a professional in the same specialty or degree as oneself), that tends to be the starting point for the next professional, not a blank slate.

It is for this reason that many people have diagnoses added to their record, but few removed. New professionals don’t rule out the possibility of the old diagnosis, they just add another one to capture what they believe is going on with the individual.

Only when a person finds a professional who is willing to look very critically at the client’s or patient’s record and question all previous assumptions (ala “House M.D.”) does a person break free from a pattern of misdiagnosis.

The article is worth a read and the emphasis on critical thinking is worth a second look for medical and graduate schools.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 19 Mar 2007
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.