5
" I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases, and chemical reactions— frenulum, otitis, glycolysis— was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge. The profusion of facts obscured a deeper and more significant problem: the reconciliation between knowledge (certain, fixed, perfect, concrete) and clinical wisdom (uncertain, fluid, imperfect, abstract). "
― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science
13
" Every diagnostic challenge in medicine can be imagined as a probability game. This is how you play the game: you assign a probability that a patient’s symptoms can be explained by some pathological dysfunction—heart failure, say, or rheumatoid arthritis—and then you summon evidence to increase or decrease the probability. Every scrap of evidence—a patient’s medical history, a doctor’s instincts, findings from a physical examination, past experiences, rumors, hunches, behaviors, gossip—raises or lowers the probability. "
― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science