-
- Jesse M Pines.
- Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. pinesjes@uphs.upenn.edu
- Acad Emerg Med. 2006 Jan 1; 13 (1): 90-4.
AbstractConfirmation bias is a pitfall in emergency care and may lead to inaccurate diagnoses and inappropriate treatments and care plans. Because of the increasing severity and volume of emergency care, emergency physicians often must rely on heuristics, such as rule-out protocols, as a guide to diagnosing and treating patients. The use of heuristics or protocols can be potentially misleading if the initial diagnostic impression is incorrect. To minimize cognitive dissonance, clinicians may accentuate confirmatory data and ignore nonconfirmatory data. Clinicians should recognize confirmation bias as a potential pitfall in medical decision making in the emergency department. Reliance on the scientific method, Bayesian reasoning, metacognition, and cognitive forcing strategies may serve to improve diagnostic accuracy and improve patient care.
Notes
Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
- Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as
*italics*,_underline_or**bold**. - Superscript can be denoted by
<sup>text</sup>and subscript<sub>text</sub>. - Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines
1. 2. 3., hyphens-or asterisks*. - Links can be included with:
[my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com) - Images can be included with:
 - For footnotes use
[^1](This is a footnote.)inline. - Or use an inline reference
[^1]to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document[^1]: This is a long footnote..