Doctors are from Mars, patients are from Venus.

It sounds like a play on Dr John Gray’s brilliant book from 1992, but from our medical school days, the way we process information diverges from the way our patients process it.

We spend a lot of time learning not only critical thinking, but also the synthesis of salient data to generate a list of plausible working diagnoses, scientifically narrowing them down to the correct one, then formulating appropriate management plans.

The null hypothesis is not far from the mind of a good diagnostician in ruling out differential diagnoses in the workup of a patient’s health problem.