Six clinicians were asked to choose one of the three available treatments (antithyroid drugs, surgery and radioiodine) and to rate the appropriateness of each treatment, for 40 patients already diagnosed as thyrotoxic, on the basis of five items of information about each patient. An examination of the extent to which they used this information showed that all effectively used less than five items and that three of them used fewer items in the choice than in the scaling task. Comparison of an individual’s performance on the two tasks gave some insight into his approach to choosing a treatment. It is suggested that choice of treatment should in future be explicitly approached through rating the appropriateness of each treatment.

No abstract