b'BREAKING THE CYCLEPattern recognition is part of everyday practice. But the ability to use pattern recognitionintuitive reasoningis a skill anyone can learn. To physicians, it is the reasoning employed after practice and specialization. That comes with experience. Medicine is experiential. But to develop intuitive reasoning, you must first employ analytical reasoning, ensuring the things youre seeing match up with the diseases you know.As you specialize, the number of diseases you know well goes down, but the amountStudents have to know about many diseases, you know about those diseases goes up.but only the classic presentationthe black and white. In residency, you leave the other specialties behind and focus on only one. Then you start seeing patients and recognize that not all CHF presents as classic CHF. But through experience and analytical reasoning, you become comfortable with one standard deviation around the mean, recognizing that CHF-1 and CHF+1 are actually still just CHF. As an attending, you become comfortable with two standard deviations. But there is so much more to being a physician than recognizing the patterns or being comfortable with variation in those patterns. What sets doctors apart is the fund 10of knowledge coupled with those patterns.'