Leading medical and research institutions have documented that physicians and surgeons sometimes rely on clinical intuition, experience, pattern recognition, and “gut feeling” alongside evidence, testing, and established medical judgment when caring for patients.

​

MIT reported that physicians’ “gut feelings” influenced decisions about patient testing, particularly early in a hospital stay when less clinical information was available. MIT researcher Mohammad Ghassemi explained: “They’re tapping into something that the machine may not be seeing.”

​

Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Milind Desai, MD, described the beginning of diagnosing high-risk aortic valve endocarditis in direct terms: “The most important first step is clinical intuition.” He then explains how that suspicion leads to blood cultures, laboratory testing, and echocardiography.

​

Harvard Medicine Magazine describes the rapid assessments physicians make from signs and symptoms as “fast, or intuitive, thinking,” explaining that this form of reasoning helps doctors move efficiently through clinical decisions while slower analytical thinking becomes essential when a diagnosis or treatment response does not fit expectations.

​

At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, researchers created a formal Surgical Intuition Project. Their work states: “Merging a surgeon’s intuition with machine learning methods represents an important potential opportunity” and is designed to measure surgeons’ intuition about individual patients and determine whether it can improve prediction of patient outcomes.

​

MIT has also reported that anesthesiologists administering pain-control medication during surgery “have to rely heavily on intuition and past experience” when determining drug administration while researchers work to develop more objective physiological measures.