Demographic information about a specific subset of patients can help physicians recognize conditions they do not expect to find in the larger population.
The WHO Clinical Staging System for HIV/AIDS allows physicians in resource-limited settings to make clinical decisions based on patient clinical features instead of laboratory tests.
A consensus has emerged that the paternalism behind use of the provocative saline infusion test for nonepileptic seizures cannot be justified because the harms to the patient, the physician, and their relationship exceed the benefits.
Clinical decision making calls for use of both explicit and tacit knowledge despite evidence-based medicine's assumption that explicit information is sufficient.