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 In her book, How Doctors Think, Kathryn Montgomery analyzes clinical judgment and the practice of medicine. Montgomery is an erudite who develops her thesis thoroughly, with wonderful prose, to argue the following: Clearly, phronesis relies on a unique notion of causality: causality in medicine is often murky, from a scientific perspective (is a patient's headache caused by over contracting blood vessels or poor diet or irregular sleep patterns, for instance), but this underlying biochemical cause need not be identified specifically in order to care for a patient successfully. All that matters is finding a way to alleviate a patient's illness and restore, maintain, or enhance her health. The practice of medicine is practical: the goal is to relieve suffering and rejuvenate people so that they can get back to living their lives (or move on with their lives, in the case of death and dying). If epistemology, causation, uncertainty, the limits of knowledge, and the nature of medicine interest you, I highly recommend Montgomery's wonderful book. Like Taleb's The Black Swan, Montgomery's analysis of thinking in medicine reflects extensive thought, study, and erudition, so her book serves as a platform for further inquiries into this fascinating field. Finally, I have gained interest in the analogies between the practice of medicine and intelligence analysis. On the New Risks' Weblog (thanks to a lead from my good friend Brian Geremia; read here ), Linda Popova discusses this analogy and analyzes a splendid paper, "Improving Intelligence Analysis by Looking to the Medical Profession" ( click here to read ). Clearly, there exist many parallels and similarities between these two crafts that deal with real-world uncertainty every day with dramatic consequences. Peruse this paper and Popova's blog for now; I look forward to expounding upon this area of inquiry in the near future.
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