Clinical method versus new technologies

Abstract

Technological development in medical sciences could lead professionals to the false idea that in an era of so much technological advance, questioning, thorough medical examination, symptoms and sign diagnosis, syndromes and nosological entities establishment at the patients’ bed are obsolete, and that the scientific method applied to the process health-disease, that is, the clinical method is inadequate. In this term the author´s aim was analyzing the indiscriminate influence of the technology in medical diagnosing in disadvantage of the clinical method usage. The clinical method is the scientific method applied to work with patients.   It is a system of rules to order procedures the physician uses to bring together symptoms and signs; with them the physician  works out diagnoses, consisting in accurately knowing, denominating and classifying a disease, improving medical practice and professional teaching and education. The clinical method stages are problem, searching for basic information, hypothesis, comparing presumptive diagnosis with the definitely-set diagnosis. Many physicians in the world have developed dependence on the laboratory analyses, image techniques and electrocardiograms to increase their incomes, and others are “colonized” by techniques and have weakened, by misuse or bad use, their abilities for questioning, examining, arriving to diagnoses from symptoms, syndromes, diseases and differentials and their reasoning capacity. The clinical method is not obsolete; technology does get obsolete, and may fails, but it is not less important as a complementary, so the most rational way is, making hypotheses and drawing a plan of research beginning from an adequate diagnosis judgment and taking into account the patient´s own characteristics, cost-benefit relation, availability, accessibility and risks.