ABSTRACT
Clinical medicine principally focuses on five things: prevention, diagnosis, therapy, palliation and rehabilitation. A sixth important element is prognosis; it is a second-order judgement based on diagnosis, effectiveness of available therapies and the current methods of rehabilitation and palliation. Public health is the dominant domain of prevention. Rehabilitation aims to return an individual to her pre-disease or pre-injury state of being. If addiction is not considered a disease, it is an addition to this list. Palliation occurs at all stages of medical intervention from the alleviation of symptoms to end-of-life care. The taxonomy of preventative medicine has four categories: primordial, primary, secondary and tertiary prevention. Clinical judgement is the concern for integrating the totality of considerations undergirding reasoning in clinical practice relevant to the care of an individual patient. Most clinical encounters result in incomplete understanding of the patient's problems.
