Clinical judgment: an essential method in medicine

Physicians rely on clinical judgment and patients look for it. However, clinical judgment is infrequently discussed in the literature, and is often perceived as an intuitive art, that is likely to be replaced by technology and artificial intelligence. This review offers a reconceptualization of the role of clinical judgment in current medical practice and research, informed by the extensive knowledge that has accumulated in psychosomatic medicine. Clinical judgment consists of three phases: collecting clinical information; interpretation and clinical reasoning; decision making. Interviewing is the primary method for gathering data. Clinical reasoning involves bringing together relevant information and formulating hypotheses, which result in decisions and therapeutic acts. Clinimetrics, the science of clinical measurements, facilitates physician's reasoning and organization of data. Improving the features of clinical judgment is likely to yield a highly effective precision medicine.