Elephants, bushes, hot porridge… and clinical intuition?

There is a Scandinavian expression, to pace around hot porridge like a cat. It means avoiding a complicated topic, and corresponds to sayings such as beating around the bush and ignoring the elephant in the room. This idiom might be reformulated, when it comes to training of doctors, as to pace around clinical judgement like a medical educator. When questions about judgement arise, intuition is more easily summarised as experience assimilated by senior colleagues, than elaborated on with regards to an actual epistemological meaning. This provides a false sense of security: riding roughshod over the implicit component of clinical judgement paves the way for irrational solutions to conflicts among physicians, replacing closer examinations of individual patients by decisions based on routine or charisma alone.