The Good Doctor: Why Medical Uncertainty Matters

What makes a good doctor? It’s not what you think. A doctor willing to face their own uncertainty in the face of illness and treatment might just be the best medicine.

Too often we choose the wrong doctor for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t have to be that way. In The Good Doctor, Ken Brigham, MD, and Michael M.E. Johns, MD, argue that we need to change the way we think about health care if we want to be the healthiest we can be. Counterintuitive as it may seem, uncertainty is integral to medicine, and you want a doctor who knows that- someone who sees you as the unique case you are, someone who knows that data isn’t everything, someone who is able to change her mind as the information changes. For too long we’ve clung to the myth of the infallible doctor–one who assuredly tells us this is what’s wrong and here is how I will cure you–and our health has suffered for it. Brigham and Johns propose a new model of medicine, one that is comfortable with ambiguity and that centers on an equal partnership between patient and doctor. Uncertainty, properly embraced, opens a new universe of possibilities.