Clinical probabilities or the crisis of medical rationality

The medical application of the law of large numbers has long frightened clinicians for its potential to reduce the physician to be “just an arithmetic machine” and the patient to be “only an average pathological individual”. The issues of clinical decision-making that have responded since the 19th century to a dual requirement of care and knowledge have thus generated a crisis of medical rationality. Clinical medicine, by striving to render chance positive, has thus opposed art to science. By considering this conflict in the long history of medicine, the article comes to question the digitization of the medical decision made by means of A.I. and big data, from an epistemological as well as ethical point of view.