Uncertainty
You may be uncertain why 'uncertainty' deserves a place in a medical dictionary but some would say that uncertainty is a key element in medicine.
'The core predicament of medicine -- the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult and being a part of a society that pays the bills they run up so vexing -- is uncertainty,' observed the surgeon Atul Gawande.
'Medicine's ground state is uncertainty.
And wisdom -- for both patients and doctors -- is defined by how one copes with it.'</P> Source: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science.
By Atul Gawande.
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2002.