Making decision - Assignment Example

However in some cases, nurses do encounter patients with conditions that cannot fit any recognized data, or known study to base their decisions on. In such cases, a nurse has to take time in analytical reasoning. However, magnetic resonance imaging of the brain suggest that analytical and intuitive reasoning activities occur in different brain sections, though the two areas do not operate in isolation (Rajkomar & Dhaliwal, 2011). Therefore, in case a nurse is faced with large volumes of data regarding complex medial cases, intuitive decision making becomes the best way to decide, though on reasonably high rates of success.

However, this cognitive ability will mostly rely on recollection of cases that are memorable, leading to an unavoidable biasness, which makes the nurse to stop any further searching in case the available data confirms the diagnosis (Rajkomar & Dhaliwal, 2011). The application of the selected approach in treatment in such a case would be through intuition; since the accuracy depends on the nurse’s reasoning, it may lead to wrong diagnosis. . However, in some cases clinicians are faced with situations that the illness diagnosed does not in any way match the patient at hand, which has diverted attention from the hypothetical –deductive reasoning to intuitive judgment.

Rajkomar & Dhaliwal (2011) explains that the reason behind this is that clinicians are continuously being faced with patients who do not fit any previous recognized patterns. This requires the clinicians to comb through their knowledge and external information searching for a clinical solution. The material gather leads to an intuitive process of making decisions where the degree of accuracy differs with experience and reasoning of the clinician. Moreover, Sibbals & Cavalcanti (2011) argue that clinical history may as well lead to diagnostic errors, in additio to enhancing diagnostic accuracy.

In other words, a doctor due to experience and constant use of the hypothetical-deductive approach in making clinical decisions might jump into a diagnostic closure without searching for alternatives, leading to anchoring biasness, one way in which errors in diagnostics occurs. Therefore, the mental process employed in formulating diagnosis becomes necessary though complex, which calls for an intuitive decision making in clinical diagnosis. Moreover, researchers continually call for the need to make reasoned decisions based on a face to face diagnosis with a patient, rather than on “dehumanized statistical approaches,” which allows the clinician to understand the specifics of each patient (Braude, 2012).

In other words, Braude asserts that intuition is important and vital for human judgment as the intuition