Scoring systems for the critically ill: use, misuse and abuse.

摘要

The Cartesian premise that 'if something can't be quantified, its existence should be questioned,, is implicit in much of modern medicine. Many of us are attracted to quantification, and in a world dominated by data, the idea of numeric certainty holds allure. Scoring systems for the purpose of appraising severity and outcome have thus been developed for the critically ill.1 While accurate and useful across groups of patients, their presence tempts clinicians to suppose that individual patients with good scores will do well, and individual patients with bad scores won't. Attractive as this may seem, it is wrong.