You make calls like this every day, drawing on your training, your experience, your judgment. The question isn't whether you found the right answer. It's whether you can defend how you got there.
A patient returns for a third visit with the same complaint. The prior two visits each closed with a different working diagnosis. This visit, the clinician orders no new testing and renews the existing plan.
Make your call — then see how Stan reasons through both sides.
"Your judgment already got you to a decision. This is where you prove you can defend it."
Clinical practice doesn't hand you clean answers. It hands you incomplete information, time pressure, and a decision you have to stand behind — sometimes months later, in front of someone who wasn't in the room.
StanKnowsIt is a weekly clinical vignette built around one question: not "what would you do," but whether the decision that was actually made — using real clinical judgment — can be defended.
Stan is StanKnowsIt's Chief Reasoning Officer — part mascot, part rigorous second opinion. He isn't here to catch you being wrong. He's here to make sure that whatever you decide, you can stand behind it.
A primary care physician with a Direct Primary Care practice in Pittsburgh who built the tool she wished existed — a way to keep her own clinical reasoning sharp against real cases, without the pretense that medicine ever hands you a clean answer.
"A platform for clinicians to strengthen other clinicians."
Join the waitlist and be first to get StanKnowsIt's weekly vignette when it launches — free, in your inbox, one defensible decision at a time.