Le raisonnement pratique : entre casuistique et statistique ?

Abstract: What are the processes of judgment in a clinical practice? We describe statistical reasoning by EBM and reasoning by case analysis. There is a disagreement between these two ways of operating. On one side, there is a deductive reasoning is based on an average patient, a specific technique and a type of disease. On the other side, an inductive reasoning based on the description of prototypical patient, the context and some procedural rules that are limited in a specific domain. Those modes of reasoning organise two types of debate, based on public and private proof. The description of the procedures of observation of a phenomenon is the principal problem to clarify this disagreement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]