From clinical medicine's bedside method, made a teachable discipline by Richard C. Cabot (Differential Diagnosis, 1911) and refined by Lawrence L. Weed (1969) and Pat Croskerry (2003).
Lists every plausible cause of a symptom, flags the common and the dangerous ones, then gathers the evidence that separates them until one explanation is strong enough to act on.
When to reach for it
Several different causes that could produce the same symptom in a process or business, where grabbing the first plausible answer would be costly.
How it runs
- Describe the symptoms, context, and history precisely.
- List candidate causes, including rare ones too dangerous to miss.
- Estimate how common each cause is.
- Run the test that best separates the leading candidates.
- Update the odds and drop causes the evidence rules out.
- Act once one cause clearly dominates.
Where it sits in SOLVE eX
Go to the source
- Differential Diagnosis: Presented through an Analysis of 383 Cases, W. B. Saunders; volume two 1915, 1911
- Medical Records, Medical Education, and Patient Care: The Problem-Oriented Record as a Basic Tool, Case Western Reserve University Press, 1969
- The Importance of Cognitive Errors in Diagnosis and Strategies to Minimize Them, Academic Medicine 78(8), 2003