ABSTRACT
Critical thinking and decision-making in the health sciences and professions, including medicine, has evolved into a well-organized and structured process to be mastered, used, and evaluated in both practice and research. Thinking and reasoning in medicine is organized around three sequential concepts: postulating an original idea that triggers a reasoning process, producing a series of premises, and analyzing and integrating the premises to produce a conclusion. Argumentation falls into the domain of reasoning, a tool used to form conclusions, judgments, or inferences from facts or premises. Physicians follow several steps and considerations when taking care of their patients: learning about the patient's past and present through medical history that includes gathering written and oral information about the past and present. Inductive research can often lead to what philosophers call inductive reasoning, in which premises bring only a limited degree of support to a study's conclusions.
