In the first few sections, Groopman explores how, when, and why diagnoses are missed by some physicians and captured by others. The book begins with a brief description of a woman with abdominal pains. Originally, she was diagnosed for years with a series of functional and mental disorders, including bulimia (Groopman, 2008). Further on a physician, beginning with careful elicitation of the patients story, was able to set aside those prior diagnoses to discover that she in fact had celiac disease. Later, he describes a patient given a grave prognosis only to recover, revealing the faulty and limited logic of the physicians providing care (Groopman, 2008). Cognitive psychology is used in this because cognitive psychologists are most concerned with studying how we think, perceive, remember, forget, solve problems, focus, and learn. But unlike the behaviorist school of thought that focuses only on observable behaviors, cognitive psychology studies internal mental states and processes (Cacioppo, 206). The constant examples of certain case studies from patient and physic
ians explains that Groopman is using cognitive psychology to show how doctors think through their patients and everything they do to perceive
Any professional who must assimilate and synthesize complex, ambiguous information must develop efficient means for processing data. Medical students are taught to gather a complete set of data then make an exhaustive list of possible diagnoses that are eliminated one by one until the correct one is reached. This approach is hardly practical for busy clinicians and, in fact, often can lead experts astray. More efficient approaches use pattern recognition, heuristics, and illness scripts, which provide coherent links between knowledge and experience. These cognitive shortcuts are highly personal, we each have our own internal library of facts, experiences, and procedures that help us locate a patients expression of distress within a diagnostic framework quickly and accurately. This personal library helps build a physicianΒs personality which plays a major role on how doctors think through the process of helping their patients.