“Mistakes are usually made because someone had insufficient or bad data,” Says John C. Johnson, M.D., director of emergency medical services at Porter Memorial Hospital in Valparaiso, Indiana.
The way to get good data is to ask questions. At he emergency room, Dr. Johnson is faces with life-or-death crises daily. His powers of observation and a willingness to think beyond the obvious are what get him through. For example, he describes the case of a badly wheezing child whisked into the emergency room for care. If the attending doctor wasn’t thinking clearly, he might reason that the child was having an asthma attack and treat him accordingly. But a sharper doctor would first ascertain when the wheezing began and whether the child had been playing with any small objects. He might discover that the child was choking-and save life.
As Sherlock Holmes said to the ever-bumbling Watson: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.”