In discussing analytical thinking, two particular types are relevant to healthcare, and these are critical thinking and statistical thinking. We will explore each of these in further detail.

Critical thinking

Sharples and colleagues, in their paper titled Critical Thinking in Healthcare and Education, described critical thinking as ‘the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe‘, and they portrayed it as a skill that ‘is essential for the practice of medicine’. Asserting that ‘it is important for clinicians and patients to learn to think critically’,  they argued that ‘the teaching and learning of these skills should be considered explicitly’. On their part, Croskerry and Nimmo, in a paper titled Better clinical decision making and reducing diagnostic error, describe six stages in the evolution of critical thinking; at the bottom is the unreflective thinker who doesn’t self-monitor his or her thoughts, and whose thinking is undermined by prejudices and misconceptions. The hierarchy then progresses through the stages of the challenged, the beginning, the practicing, and the advanced critical thinker. At the top of the pyramid is the accomplished thinker who ‘systematically takes charge of thinking and strives for improvement‘, and who is able to assess thinking for such features as its clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, and logic. The authors further characterised the accomplished thinker as having a ‘high degree of intellectual humility, integrity, perseverance, courage, empathy, autonomy, responsibility and fair-mindedness‘.