Patients can have as many diseases as they well please.
The clinical counterweight to Occam's razor. In elderly patients multiple simultaneous conditions are the norm, so parsimony is the wrong prior and unifying diagnoses are often wrong.
In practice
- An elderly patient's breathlessness is heart failure and anaemia and a chest infection, and looking for one diagnosis delays two treatments.
- A production outage has a slow query, an undersized cache and a retry storm, and fixing only the query returns it to service until Thursday.
- Standing
- The clinical counterweight to Occam's razor.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- Rules for weighing claims