Gut feeling: Can it be taught?

Dear Sir

We read with interest “Gut feeling: Does it have a place in the modern physician’s toolkit?” by Biswas (2015) who evaluates the importance of a clinician’s “gut-feeling” in clinical practice and suggests that strategies should be incorporated into medical teaching to develop this intuition.

As undergraduates on placement, we are often impressed by a consultant’s natural intuition in the clinical setting and have wondered how these skills are acquired: is this intuition developed through growing knowledge or is it part of the individual’s innate ability.

Biswas highlights the relationship between the practice of evidence-based medicine and intuitive medicine and therefore one could argue that as one is taught, the other should be nurtured simultaneously. Intuitive medicine should be encouraged in clinicians, as it potentially forms the foundation to future evidence-based medicine. Furthermore, Biswas suggests that as individual experiences contribute to the development of intuitive clinical judgement; early exposure to such experiences should encourage its use and strengthen its reliability. This could be provided through:

1. As part of the final year of undergraduate teaching, medical students could be provided with cases that stimulate the use of intuition. Such cases should be drawn from actual experiences of teaching clinicians, where they themselves relied on their gut feeling. By completing these scenarios, students would not only have an opportunity to discover what their own personal response would be, but would also learn from the outcome of the real-life situation.

2. Students could also receive intuitive teaching within the hospital setting, whereby clinicians would provide “bed-side” teaching to encourage instinctive clinical judgment in patient management and diagnosis. If appropriate suggestions were made by the student, this exercise should make them more confident of their own gut feeling. Alternatively, feedback would be given in order to mature their intuitive skills, well in advance of when they may be required to use them. In addition, supporting this teaching with a reflective learning portfolio would maximise learning from these experiences.

We ourselves would like to receive this teaching within the medical school curriculum to enhance our intuitive ability as future doctors.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.