Navigating uncertainty

Thought leaders, creative types, and scientists may embrace uncertainty as a route to creativity, discovery, and fulfilment. But uncertainty is often ignored, feared, and hushed up in clinical medicine. Our editorialist Steven Hatch invites clinicians to stop trafficking in certitude, with diagnoses and research results that sound triumphantly final (doi:10.1136/bmj.j2180). If we sound certain we participate in self delusion and encourage it among our patients. If uncertainty is embraced, its admission “forms the starting point for a more open conversation between patient and clinician,” he writes.

But uncertainty may not feel creative …