Reclaiming magical incantation in graduate medical education

Critical thinking relies upon conceptualization (what is the possible pathophysiology?), analysis (how do I relate an aberration in physiology to the lived experience of illness?), and synthesizing (how do I best intervene?). These cognitive skills are subsumed in the category of reflective competencies and are necessary for developing a differential diagnosis or a plan of care. A vulnerability of teaching medicine through the filter of heuristics is that it may simply recapitulate the teacher's style of cognitive shortcuts. Poorly calibrated heuristics may culminate in systematic errors of judgment. If the aim is to teach critical reasoning in the arena of clinical education, then a new paradigm is called for. Teaching critical reasoning as it applies to medical decision-making begins with recognizing decision scripts.Key Points• Medical heuristics are high-stakes endeavors.• The process of examining the choice of heuristics employed in any given clinical scenario is a meta-reasoning strategy.• Debiasing reduces cognitive errors due to motivated reasoning.