What is clinical reasoning

Clinical reasoning is presented as the ability to think, make decisions, and critically examine one’s own thinking in clinical practice. The session emphasizes that reasoning is not just reaching conclusions, but also questioning how those conclusions are formed. Learners are introduced to the goal of using clinical reasoning to make better medical and functional diagnoses, develop multiple hypotheses, and choose logical management plans together with the patient. The speaker explains that clinical reasoning relies on several layers of knowledge, including research, experience, practical skills, clinical knowledge, ethics, theory, situational awareness, and intuition. A central idea is that logic changes with experience, so clinicians must stay open to revising their assumptions. Through a geography-based quiz, the session shows how pattern recognition, prior knowledge, and hypothesis generation work in much the same way as they do in patient assessment. Key concepts also include cognition and metacognition: identifying relevant versus irrelevant information, organizing assessment findings, and monitoring one’s own thought processes to avoid simply agreeing with oneself.