In short, relying on heuristics as a tool for medical decision making can help practitioners to make accurate, transparent, and quick

decisions, often while depending on little technology and few financial resources. Less information, complexity, time, and technology can be more efficient, even when it comes to medical decision making. Why heuristics work One reason for the surprising performance of heuristics is that they ignore information. As we have explained above, this makes them quicker to execute, easier to understand, and easier to communicate. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Importantly, as can be shown by means of mathematical analysis and computer simulations,36-53 it is also this feature that drives part of the predictive power of heuristics. Let us illustrate this

with a simplifying, fictional story. Imagine two Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical doctors. One doctor, let’s call him Professor selleckchem Complexicus (PhD), is known for his scrutiny — he takes all information about a patient into account, including the most minute details. His philosophy is that all information is potentially relevant, and that Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical considering as much information as possible benefits decisions. The other physician, Doctor Heuristicus, in contrast, relies only on a few pieces of information, perhaps those that she deems to be the most relevant ones. We can think of the two doctors’ decision strategies as integration models. One of Professor Complexicus’ models might read like this: y = w1x1a1 + w2x2a2 + w3x3a3 + w4x4a4 + w5x5a5 + wixiai + z. A simpler model of Doctor Heuristicus could throw away some of the free parameters, wiai and z, as well as some of the predictor variables, xi, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical such that w1x1 + z. The criterion both doctors wish to infer could be the number of days different

patients will need to recover from a medical condition, y. The predictor Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical variables, xi, could be the type of condition the patients suffer from, the patients’ overall physical constitution or age, or the number of times loving family members have visited the patients in the hospital thus far. In a formal, statistical analysis, a comparative evaluation of these two models would entail computing R2 or some other goodness-of-fit index between the models’ estimations and the observed number of days it took the patients to recover. Such measures from are based on the distance between a model’s estimate and the criterion y. And indeed, fitting Professor Complexicus’ strategy of paying attention to more variables and weighting them in an optimal way (ie, minimizing least squares) to observations about past patients (ie, the ones where one already knows how many days they needed to recover), will always lead to a larger R2 than fitting Doctor Heuristicus* simpler strategy to these observations.