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Steven Hatch, MD, explores uncertainty in medicine in his new book. |
In his new book, Steven C. Hatch, MD, assistant professor of medicine, focuses on the theme of uncertainty in medicine, something he considers an underappreciated reality in medical diagnosis and treatment.
Snowball in a Blizzard: A Physician's Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine, released in by Basic Books, is described as a “penetrating examination of uncertainty in diagnoses and treatment” in a review published in the journal Nature. It has also been highlighted in the Boston Globe Books section.
“It’s about the idea that there is an oversimplified process in medicine and that doctors always know what’s going on. This is the perception, a misconception. This is not really how medicine works,” Dr. Hatch said.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Hatch said patients and to some degree doctors labor under the idea that there is always a right answer or that there is a definitive answer to a question.
“I think part of getting away from the simple yes-or-no answers, both for patients and physicians, is to try to get to this model of what constitutes a strong recommendation, what constitutes a moderate recommendation and what constitutes a weak recommendation. And what constitutes, like, ‘Psh, I don’t know,’” Hatch said in the article.
He said he first started thinking about the “fuzziness” in medicine in 2009 after the release of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s preliminary recommendation on mammograms.
“It was a real revelation for me coming to grips with the fact that mammograms aren’t nearly the life-saving tests that people perceive them to be. There is a lot of fuzziness. I started thinking about that on a deeper level, considering other aspects of medicine,” he said.
Hatch said he wrote from a physician’s perspective, but that his experience as a patient and the family member of a patient are what informed the book.
