Commentary: Breaking the Mold of Normative Clinical Decision Making: Is It Adaptive, Suboptimal, or Somewhere in Between?

Two articles in this issue, "Contextual decision making and the implementation of clinical guidelines" by Falzer and Garman, and " PERSPECTIVE: Uses and misuses of thresholds in diagnostic decision making" by Warner et al, take very different approaches to the issue of variation among physicians in diagnostic and therapeutic decision making. Falzer and Garman critically examine the well-known phenomenon of poor compliance with practice …