In this Information Age the practices of clinical medicine should no longer be based on what
clinical doctors actively know. Rather all of the importantly practice-relevant knowledge
should not only already exist but also be codified in cyberspace in directly practice-guiding
'expert systems' -- for the benefit of both doctors and patients everywhere. Each of these
systems (discipline-specific) would prompted by a particular type of case presentation
present the doctor a questionnaire specific to cases of the type at issue and document the
doctor's answers to the questions. If at issue would be a case of complaint about a (particular
type of) sickness the system would translate the resulting diagnostic profile of the case into
the corresponding probabilities of the illnesses to be considered. Similarly if at issue would
be an already-diagnosed case of a particular illness the system would ask about and record
the relevant elements in the prognostic profile of the case and then translate this profile
into the probabilities of various outcomes to be considered probabilities specific to the
choice of treatment and prospective time in addition to that profile. And besides these
systems would analogously address the causal origin -- etiogenesis -- of cases of particular
types of illness. While the requisite knowledge-base for these systems -- notably for the
probabilities in them -- has not been addressed by such 'patient-oriented' clinical research as
has been conducted (very extensively) up to now this book delineates the nature of the
suitably-transformed research (gnostic). The critically-transformative innovation in the
research is the studies' focus on Gnostic Probability Functions -- dia- etio- and prognostic
-- in the framework of logistic regression models. This book also presents a vision of how this
critically-transformative research would most expeditiously be provided for and also conducted
among select sets of academic teaching hospitals.
