Healthcare students are very good at remembering things. Years of interviews, revision and examinations have trained you how to place limitless complex information into your head and retrieve it when required. Traditional medical textbooks focus on this process: teaching students to know what a healthcare professional knows.
This book takes a different approach. We want to teach you to think like a healthcare professional thinks. Possessing the knowledge is only part of the equation. Using this knowledge to make a reasoned diagnosis, and then develop a management plan for individual patients: this is the very soul and centre of clinical medicine. In our case studies, we lay out the thought processes and logical steps required when a healthcare professional meets a new patient. We show how some conditions can be ruled out or ruled in, and why diagnosis A is more likely than diagnosis B or C. Our ambition is to demystify the diagnostic process, and show you that clinical reasoning can be learned and developed, just like anything else.