If you are reading this blog chances are you already possess this rare quality. It is what led you to Integrative Health, probably disappointed with the Health care system. You know that Critical Thinking has blessed your life and that of your loved ones. So, this blog cannot help you much, except to congratulate you and share an article on this topic (see below.)
We all wish that the vaunted INTELLIGENCE of those who have perpetuated a broken health care system would yield a little to WISDOM, the wisdom that you have earned by being open to new ideas and to critically think about what you are exposed to, instead of taking someone else’s opinion. You and I have chosen the Less Travelled Road. Let us continue to share with others the lessons and joys we have found in our journey.
Critical thinking in healthcare and education
BMJ 2017;357:j2234
Imagine you are a primary care doctor. A patient comes into your office with acute, atypical chest pain. Immediately you consider the patient’s sex and age, and you begin to think about what questions to ask and what diagnoses and diagnostic tests to consider. You will also need to think about what treatments to consider and how to communicate with the patient and potentially with the patient’s family and other healthcare providers. Some of what you do will be done reflexively, with little explicit thought, but caring for most patients also requires you to think critically about what you are going to do.
Critical thinking, the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe, is essential for the practice of medicine. Few doctors are likely to argue with this. Yet, until recently, the UK regulator the General Medical Council and similar bodies in North America did not mention “critical thinking” anywhere in their standards for licensing and accreditation,1 and critical thinking is not explicitly taught or assessed in most education programmes for health professionals.
Moreover, although more than 2800 articles indexed by PubMed have “critical thinking” in the title or abstract, most are about nursing. We argue that it is important for clinicians and patients to learn to think critically and that the teaching and learning of these skills should be considered explicitly. Given the shared interest in critical thinking with broader education, we also highlight why healthcare and education professionals and researchers need to work together to enable people to think critically about the health choices they make throughout life.
