[Medical decision making: some aspects].

Abstract

Three main aspects of medical decision making will be shortly described in this article. Comprehensible information is required to make decisions. The question is, how much information is needed to make decisions, and a third aspect in this article concerns the decision maker. Research in the field of information transfer has shown that medical information, as presented in most journals, is difficult to understand. According to the classic decision theory, decisions are taken after collecting all available information. More recent research in decision making proves the hypothesis that human beings are able to decide correctly with much less information than presumed earlier. In medicine the patient is the decision maker, and the primary task of physicians is to inform the patient about his health status and enable him to reach a conclusion.