John Launer: Living with uncertainty

I was recently invited to talk to a group of GP registrars about uncertainty in medicine. I resisted making a joke about not being sure if I was the right person to do it. However, once the session started I realised that I was pitching it wrongly for doctors with their level of experience.I’d hoped to talk about what you might call existential uncertainty: how solid medical facts so often melt into thin air, how the practice of medicine seems with experience to be like a project of trial and error. “Uncertainty,” I’ve written elsewhere, “doesn’t come occasionally, singly, or in isolated categories. It’s the ocean in which we swim for most of our working lives.”1 The young doctors present were clearly expecting something more concrete and pragmatic. This included answers to questions such as, “What do you say to a parent when you’re not sure if their child’s rash…
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