How to Write a Critical Thinking Essay in Medicine

Critical thinking skills have been associated with improved safety outcomes, enhanced patient outcomes, and better quality patient care. With this in mind, it is essential for educators in healthcare to encourage and lead further dialogue about how critical skills are taught, evaluated, and integrated into the development and design of nurse and staff training and education programs.

What Is Critical Thinking?

The simplest definition of critical thinking is the ability to make reasoned judgements. It is also the ability to think rationally and clearly about what to believe or what to do. It can also be termed as the ability to engage in independent and reflective thinking. An individual with critical thinking skills can do the following:

• Understand logical connections between multiple ideas
• Identify, structure, and evaluate arguments
• Detect weaknesses and common errors in reasoning
• Reflect on the validation of one’s values and viewpoint
• Identify the importance and relevance of ideas

How Does Critical Thinking Help Medical Students?

Medical professionals in the healthcare industry use critical thinking to derive knowledge from additional interdisciplinary subject areas to offer a complete approach to their patients. As such, medical students can use critical thinking in the following ways:

• Avoiding clinical or medical errors
• Recognizing better options for diagnosis and treatment
• Improved ability to arrive at clinical decisions
• Working in an environment with limited resources
• Increased productivity, quality work output, and quality thinking

Characteristics of a Critical Thinker

Experts opine that critical skills involve asking questions, identifying a problem, analyzing evidence, evaluating biases and assumptions, ignoring emotional reasoning, keeping away from oversimplification, and enduring vagueness.

Moreover, in consideration of other interpretations and dealing with vagueness also comprises critical thinking. Other critical thinking characteristics include:

Character – critical thinkers are precise, respect clarity, open-minded, sceptical, consider different viewpoints, and respect reasoning and evidence.

Principle – a person must apply particular principles along with other conditions that should be met for something to be perceived as believable.

Reasoning – this is an individual’s ability to come to a conclusion in consideration of one or more principles, using logical associations among data or statements.

Can Critical Thinking Be Taught?

Critical thinking can, to an extent, be taught and also enhanced and developed by experts using technology. There is massive information nowadays that suggests that students only need to have a suitable trainer to guide them through this information and instil it the right way.

Students effectively develop and apply critical thinking skills to complex problems and critical choices they are forced to make, resulting from the information explosion and other vibrant technological changes. As the most important aspect of critical thinking is questioning, it is fundamental to teach students how to ask logical, relevant, and good questions to enable efficient critical thinking and succeed.

How to Write a Critical Thinking Essay in Medicine

Ask Questions

The following questions will be useful when you are required to think broadly about a critical thinking piece. Furthermore, the questions can improve your drafting skills in the area.

• What is the foundation point?
• What changes have occurred in the course?
• What drove this decision?
• How do other people critique this idea?
•  Does the ides have supporters?
• Can the order be applied in other contexts?
• What are the consequences?
• What are the abnormal consequences?
• Can you provide examples?
• Is it suitable to have examples?
• Why do you stand with the reliability of your viewpoint? 
• What is the significance of the problem?
• Is the topic worth the effort?
• Do you have any recommendations?

By posing these questions and offering reliable answers in your critical thinking essay in medicine, you soar above conventional viewpoints and assist in getting new solutions. Although some questions cannot be suitably answered because of work specifications, you should try and answer as many as you can.

Choose a Topic: Critical Thinking Essay in Medicine Topics

Most writing guides recommend choosing a topic that is exceptional, provocative and challenging. Apart from this, choose a topic that is interesting to you. Otherwise, you can choose a provocative or challenging topic but find it boring, which will make it hard for you to complete the critical thinking assignment.

Mostly, supervisors provide the critical thinking topic. But, if you have not been provided with a topic, you can consider any one of the following thought-provoking topics.

1. How is people’s health influenced by the modern lifestyle?
2. The history and development of medical instruments.
3. Why is poor health linked to poverty?
4. The place of cloning and genetic engineering in the 21^st century
5. The role of unconventional forms of medicine in healthcare.
6. Accountability for medical errors
7. Effective approaches to obesity issues.
8. Who decides whether to place an elderly person in a special elderly center?
9. How are particular types of medications promoted by doctors?
10. Euthanasia legalization: pros and cons
11. Bulimia and Anorexia: Physical or mental Diseases?
12. Potential threats to medical research.
13. Should it be mandatory to vaccinate children?
14. Paramedics in the general healthcare industry.
15. Should there be limits to medical tests on animals?

The topics above are extensively discussed by theoretics, practitioners, and ordinary patients. Each party has a point of view and are ready to defend their stand. Our suggestion is to choose a topic and analyze it and use all the critical skills you have.

Structural Format

The format of a critical thinking essay is important. In reality, some professors give it the same importance as the ideas in the paper. The format below will allow you to make things clear and exclude the process of rewriting the essay severally.

Critical Thinking Thesis Statement

For students writing a major academic paper for the first time, writing a critical thinking thesis statement is one of the challenges they face. The thesis is the main argument and the foundation of the entire paper. For this reason, you should take your time when writing one.

To be effective in this section, explain the main focus of the critical thinking assignment and provide an arguable claim. The thesis statement only requires a few details; do not include everything you are going to talk about in the paper. Also, rather than say that an approach or idea is bad or good, you should say that it is bad/good because…

Professors usually insist that students should avoid including obvious things in their critical essays, such as, Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin. Furthermore, it is recommendable to avoid providing your biased opinion in your argument. You should present an argument that can be sustained by evidence.

Outline

Just like any other essay, a critical thinking essay also needs an outline. You should create the outline before you start writing the introduction paragraph of your essay. This is probably the only part of the paper that you can be detailed as you can. But, remember that the materials you include in the outline should be included in the essay. So, if you put too much in the outline, your essay will be equally lengthy.

There are various outline formats. An ideal format has Roman numerals in the main chapters, Arabic numerals in the sub-chapters, and letters for specifications of the sub-chapter.

Introduction

The first thing to do when writing the introduction is to write an engaging sentence to encourage your readers to follow to ideas to its finality. Roughly speaking, the introduction is a presentation of the main concepts of your critical thinking essay in medicine. It hooks/grabs the readers’ attention with the first word. Look for an interesting statistic or fact, ask a rhetorical question and deviate from any clichés, such as nowadays…, it is apparent that…

Body

The body comprises of 3-5 paragraphs of 4-5 sentences each. The role of the body of a critical thinking essay in medicine is to sustain the key arguments you indicated in the parts above. Every paragraph is a part of the complete work, but, it is new evidence to sustain the viewpoint ha is being critically analyzed. Each paragraph is a validation of the critical thinking thesis statement.

If your supervisor allows it, you can complement the body with extra details such as background data. These details make it easier for readers to better understand the work. While writing the body, do not introduce new ideas that were not included in the thesis statement or introduction section. Unnecessary information will overload the essay making it less clear and raising more questions than answers.

Conclusion

The final section of the critical thinking essay in medicine should not be more complex than other parts of the academic paper. The concluding paragraph should summarize all the available arguments. Moreover, it emphasizes on what you tried to prove to your readers in the written task.

When approaching the end of the critical thinking assignment, reread the entire text, that is, the outline, thesis statement, introduction, and main body. Scrutinize all the parts and write only two sentences following the procedure below:

• Call to Action to make the reader give an answer, investigate the topic, give an opinion, and recommend the essay to others for reading.
• Evaluate the main points to give the reader a chance to revisit it and quickly reflect on the viability of the research and evidence provided.
• Demonstrate how the topic impacts your reader and the medical field in general.

Use all efforts to reiterate the points you stated earlier and join them in one concluding paragraph.

Proofread and Edit

When you finish writing the first draft of your critical thinking essay in medicine, there are four small steps you need to do to perfect your critical thinking assignment.

1. Take a break before editing the paper. Experienced essay writers support the idea that one can take a 2-3 day break before coming back to the complete text written. The break allows the writer to rest and recollect their thoughts. Later on, proofread the paper thoroughly to check for typos and grammatical mistakes that may affect your final grade.
2. Let someone else read your essay before you submit it. You can choose a friend, a family member, a classmate or a graduate with relevant experience in such tasks to go through your critical thinking paper. Ask the individual to make constructive comments that will enable you identify mistakes.
3. Cite resources you used in your critical thinking essay. This includes quotes, statistics, and theoretical information, which should be in a list of references.
4. Check the paper for plagiarism. A plagiarism check is done through online plagiarism checking software, which is mostly free. You have the option of downloading a PDF version of the plagiarism report to present it to your supervisor or professor.

The Role of Critical Thinking in Clinical Decision Making

Critical thinking is a powerful concept that is obtained through the process of tackling an issue using experience and systematic skills attained by virtue of accurate data correction, analysis, observation, communication, interaction, education, and data entry using suitable facts towards obtaining the most fitting solution.

To reach a decision in the nursing field, one has to critically and thoroughly examine the information obtained before making the final decision. For example, a nurse is working in the ICU where the patient is in a coma and requires treatment. To approach such an issue, one has to possess systematic skills and experience to arrive at a suitable decision. A nurse adapts such skills through critical thinking using existing facts and knowledge when suitably interpreted.

Nursing practitioners must be precise and accurate while making decisions. They should be guided by the virtue of listening, gathering suitable data, correctly analyzing the data and give an appropriate decision by the norms and intellectual standards observed in nursing. Hospital settings involve hustles and bustles with patients coming in as others leave. Therefore, a nurse should always maintain sanity and execute his/her duty appropriately. Thus without proper communication to fellow nurses, it might be difficult to provide correct information. So, communication is essential to help judge a decision through comparison of different ideas before making a decision that you may not be familiar with.

Education is an essential feature of critical thinking. More so for a nurse, he/she should be well informed about the disease the patient has. Some diseases have close symptoms so without proper knowledge, one can make a mistake when deciding on how to treat or prescribe medication.  

The consequences of the wrong treatment or prescription can lead to death or permanent personal damage. Consequently, to perfect the level of critical thinking, one needs education. While practicing clinical duties, medical practitioners are advised to attend various medical workshops and trainings to act as refresher courses to refresh ones critical thinking skills. Another vital issue if interaction. Interacting with many people from the same profession makes one acquire different ideas that you were previously not aware of. This will enhance ones capability of judgement on issues.

Interactions help in broadening of the mind and enhance their capacity to make good decisions.  It also helps in exposure that helps one gain extra experience from different people with broad minds.

Write my Critical Thinking Essay in Medicine

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