Study encourages doctors to follow gut feeling

  

September 26, 2012 (WLS) -- A new study finds doctors, like parents of young children, often rely on their intuition to help them figure out when a child is very sick.

And that gut feeling may be well worth following.

The report in the British Medical Journal says listening to those feelings may help doctors catch serious infections even if there are few obvious signs.

Scientists looked at nearly 3,900 children treated in Belgium for what were initially considered to be non-life threatening illnesses. Some were later admitted to the hospital with serious infections.

The study found that had doctors acted on their gut feelings they may have caught some of these illnesses before they became more serious.

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