Faculty PublicationsVolume 1 · Issue 5
Defending Your Clinical Reasoning
A case conference does not ask whether you were right. It asks whether you can show your work.
Dr. Marcus Ellison, Ph.D.
Residency Director & Senior Faculty
July 25, 2026
6 min readGraduate Professional
Cover plate reserved — Faculty Publications, Volume 1 · Issue 5
A case conference does not ask whether you were right. It asks whether you can show your work.
The most common weakness I see in early practitioners is not poor judgment. It is undocumented judgment — a reasonable decision that cannot be reconstructed a month later, by them or by anyone else.
What a defensible record contains
The observation that prompted the decision. The alternatives considered. The reason one was chosen. The indicator that would signal the choice was wrong. Four sentences, written at the time, are worth more than four pages written in retrospect.
“I do not ask whether you reached the right conclusion. I ask whether you can defend how you reached it.”
This standard protects the client first and the practitioner second — in that order, and never the reverse.
References
References are recorded with the manuscript and published with the article.
Estimated citation
Ellison, M. (2026). Defending Your Clinical Reasoning. Faculty Publications, 1(5). Holmes Knowledge Center, Holmes Training Academy™.