Reasonable patient care under uncertainty
讨论预测能力有限如何影响患者护理福利，分析临床决策和指南遵循中的不确定性，并应用决策理论提出具有良好福利属性的合理决策准则，如最小化最大遗憾准则。
This paper discusses how limited ability to predict illness and treatment response may affect the welfare achieved in patient care. The discussion covers both decentralized clinical decision making and care that adheres to clinical practice guidelines. I explain why predictive ability has been limited, calling attention to questionable methodological practices in the research that supports evidence-based medicine. I summarize research on identification whose objective is to yield credible prediction of patient outcomes. Recognizing that uncertainty will continue to afflict medical decision making, I apply basic decision theory to suggest reasonable decision criteria with well-understood welfare properties. Previous research on medical decision making has largely embraced Bayesian decision theory. I summarize research studying the minimax-regret criterion, which seeks uniformly near-optimal decisions.