Medcast news and blog
Developing Clinical Reasoning to Tackle the KFP
As a GP, we are undertaking clinical reasoning with nearly every patient that we see. It is most often automatic. However, in preparation for the KFP exam, it can be helpful to deconstruct the clinical reasoning process. The ultimate goal, however, is to make us better clinicians, not just to pass the exam!
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In December 2017 a renewed National Cervical Screening Program was launched in Australia.

Inattentive, impulsive, and hyperactive children have always existed, and it’s difficult to quantify the exact effect of labelling children with a disease name, rather than approaching them ‘the old-fashioned way’, whatever that might be.

In the country town where I grew up there was a GP who got very drunk at the golf club on a regular basis. His antics were a source of community amusement, and he had a lot of patients with similar alcohol misuse problems – mostly because he never talked to them about their drinking habits.

In all OSCE cases, you have three minutes of reading time. One of the tricks of success is optimising that three minutes.

Men and women are different from each other. What a profound statement that is! Also one that could get me into a lot of trouble, particularly if it led to a discussion about whether that difference was genetically or culturally determined. I’m going to say it anyway, because I’m thinking about depression and suicide and the ways in which men and women express their distress differently.

What is the evidence for 'medical expulsive therapy' using alpha blockers?

Eating disorders are truly holistic, affecting all biopsychosocial dimensions of health so we need to keep an open mind and our antennae alert in a wide variety of clinical scenarios in General Practice.

We want to DO something for our patients, in part driven by guidelines - get their blood pressure down, improve their HbA1c, improve their life expectancy, but have we forgotten to ask - is this what you really want? And at what point are we doing more harm than good with the treatments we prescribe?

Are you having difficulty getting your head around the use of technology in mental health care? The idea that computer programs might interact with humans in a humanlike way has been around for decades but ideas about implementation are getting more and more sophisticated.