This is exactly what a vast majority of US physicians seem to do: 93% of over 800 surgeons, obstetricians, and other specialists at high risk of litigation reported practices of recommending a diagnostic test or treatment that is not the best option for the patient, but

one that protects the physician against the patient as a potential plaintiff, including, for instance, unnecessary CT scans, biopsies, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and MRIs, and more antibiotics than medically indicated.10 Similarly, in the rural Michigan hospital discussed above, of about 90% of the patients who were referred to the coronary care unit, only roughly 25% actually had a myocardial infarction. In environments where risk of being sued is high if a patient is mistakenly diagnosed and/or treated as healthy and where physicians seek to avoid potential lawsuits, it is ecologically rational for them to follow the defensive heuristic “err on the safe side,” being overcautious and prescribing more Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical diagnostic tests and treatments than necessary. This defensive heuristic is not the same as an irrational reasoning error or a cognitive illusion, caused by people’s mental limitations. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical But precisely because of this, as we will discuss next, there is room for change: by changing

the environment, physicians can be led to rely on heuristics that are more beneficial to the patient. The science of fast-and-frugal heuristics Doctors and other humans cannot foresee the future, and cannot know if a diagnosis is correct for certain, or if a treatment will cure a patient for certain. Rather, they have to make decisions under uncertainty

and often under the constraints of limited time. According to the fast-and-frugal heuristics research Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical program, these decisions can nevertheless be made successfully, because Selleck GSI-IX people can rely on a large repertoire of heuristics—an adaptive toolbox—with each heuristic (ie, each tool) being adapted to a specific decision-making environment. By relying on a heuristic that is well adapted to a particular environment, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical a person can make sound decisions, often based on very little information in little time (hence “fast-and-frugal”). There are different sets of mechanisms that help people to choose among the heuristics. The first depends on the workings of basic cognitive capacities, such as memory.11 The interplay of these capacities Sodium butyrate with the environment creates for each heuristic a cognitive niche in which it can be applied. For instance, the frequency and recency with which we have encountered information in our environment influences what information we remember, and how quickly we remember it. What information comes to the mental stage, and how quickly it arrives there, in turn determines what heuristics are applicable to solve a given task. A second set of mechanisms for selecting heuristics includes social and individual learning processes that can make people more prone to choose one applicable heuristic over another.