ArticleTheoretical medicine and bioethics2026
Uncertainty tolerance in healthcare: towards a normative conception.
Article in Theoretical medicine and bioethics, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ontological deskilling: clinical expertise and the changing disease object in precision medicine.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2026Article
- Threats to neonatologists' professional identity formation: ethical implications of condensing neonatal-perinatal fellowship.Journal of perinatology : official journal of the California Perinatal Association · 2026Review
- Intensive care under uncertainty: a qualitative study of how older patients and their relatives wish to contribute to decision-making.European geriatric medicine · 2026Observational
- Shame among medical learners: An uncertainty-focused conception.Patient education and counseling · 2026Article
- Uncertainty as a driving force.Tidsskrift for den Norske laegeforening : tidsskrift for praktisk medicin, ny raekke · 2026Article
- Aligning awareness, systems and policy to increase equitable access to genomically driven cancer care.BMJ oncology · 2026Review
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Abstract
This paper critically analyzes the meaning of uncertainty tolerance (UT), a phenomenon of growing interest in healthcare. Medical practitioners, educators, and researchers have increasingly acknowledged the importance of UT for both clinicians and patients, and called for greater attention to improving it. However, we argue that the prevailing conception of UT is an inadequate normative ideal, due to its narrow understanding of uncertainty as exclusively an aversive state entailing negative outcomes, and of tolerance as merely the endurance of these outcomes. We show how this endurance-based, outcomes-focused conception of UT is both theoretically incoherent and practically unhelpful. We make the case for an alternative conception based not on endurance but adaptation, and focused not on outcomes but moral virtues, which we view as instrumental capacities that enable adaptation. We develop a provisional integrative taxonomy of these key virtues, discuss both the promises and challenges of this new adaptation-based, virtue-focused conception of UT, and identify fruitful directions for future work.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.