Friday, August 20, 2010

Critical thinking

I must admit that I have never fully figured out what "critical thinking" means. My educated guess is that you basically have to carefully study the problem/ situation you are faced with and come up with the best response/ solution for it.

Does practising medicine require critical thinking? YES/ NO/ MAYBE.
Medicine is problem solving- so logically speaking it requires critical thinking
However it is not quite the same kind of "open-ended " critical thinking that someone discussing literature or history may use.
It is a sort of "guided critical thinking". In most exams along with the question an answer key is also created- so that means that the response expected from you is more or less pre-scripted. So in reality it is probably not really critical thinking but rather "appropriate thinking". The person who gets to qualify as a doctor is one whose line of thinking more or less matches that of the examiner or well established guidelines- at least for undergraduate medicine.

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