differential diagnosis

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a systematic clinical reasoning process in which a physician considers and evaluates multiple possible diagnoses that could explain a patient's presenting symptoms, signs, and test results, ranking them by probability and working through investigations to confirm or exclude each possibility; differential diagnosis is the core intellectual activity of clinical medicine, requiring integration of knowledge of disease prevalence, pathophysiology, and the sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic tests; the process aims to avoid premature closure — fixing on a diagnosis too early and failing to consider alternatives — and to ensure that serious or treatable conditions are not missed; the final diagnosis emerges from the iterative narrowing of the differential through history-taking, examination, and targeted investigation