Abstract
Summary The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the clinical reasoning of expert and novice physiotherapists in an outpatient orthopaedic setting. Ten experienced clinicians and ten students were observed and audiotaped as they examined and treated a real, previously unseen, patient. The audiotape was reviewed immediately afterwards with the therapists by means of a semi-structured interview. The subsequent analysis showed that all used a hypothetico-deductive reasoning process. However, the experts and novices went beyond this essentially diagnostic process to include reasoning focused on treatment. In particular, manual therapy treatment was used as a method of further hypothesis testing. In addition to hypothetico-deductive reasoning the experts also made use of pattern recognition. The clinical reasoning of the physiotherapists in this study was found to be a dynamic, cyclical process. The results of the study support the model of clinical reasoning proposed by Jones (1992) .
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