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| Medical Decision Making: A Physician’s Guide | Buy a book...
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| Author(s): | A. Schwartz and G. Bergus |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| ISBN: | 9780521697699 |
| Format: | softback |
| 211pp | |
| Price: | £29.99, $60.00 |
| Review Date: | 23 June 2008 |
| Review: | Decision making is perhaps the key activity in health care. It is the exercise of clinical judgment and its application to decisions being faced by individual patients that distinguishes the outstanding physician. The book is aimed at health professions, especially medicine and nursing. It begins with the problem of determining goals and objectives of medical care and with methods for assessing values and the quality of life. It does include the rational aspects of probability theory and uncertainty but it puts values at the centre of its approach. The book covers all major topics in medical decision making and at a level appropriate for a reader who would not need specialist knowledge of the subject but who wants to know the essentials. Topics include: the role of values in many decisions, decision making with multiple or competing objectives, decision analysis by visualization and decision trees and influence diagrams, cost effectiveness analysis including quality-adjusted life years, and psychology of judgment. |