As I recently moved from country WA to the beautiful Sunshine Coast – which has also increased my commuting time – I have more time to listen to podcasts. I particularly enjoy BBC’s
Inside Health
with GP Dr Mark Porter.
One of the recent topics on the show was ‘gut feeling’. Dr Porter interviewed GP Dr Ann Van den Bruel who has done some fascinating research on this topic.
In one study, published in BMJ, Van den Bruel was able to calculate the diagnostic accuracy of the doctor’s instinct and found that it is one of the most powerful predictors of, for example, serious infections in children. One of the recommendations of the authors is:
We should certainly make clear when teaching that an inexplicable (or not fully explicable) gut feeling is an important diagnostic sign and a good reason for seeking the opinion of someone with more expertise…
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Gut feeling or intuition is high sensitive and can help you not to miss things at the price of false positives. Logic is highly specific but can miss things that have not yet been fully declared. Hence I am a big advocate of using both clinical “tests”.