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Primary care clinicians see many children every day with minor, self-limiting infections. Identifying the rare child with a serious infection among the many mildly ill children requires both clinical skill and intuition. Researchers prospectively examined the diagnostic value of the clinician's intuition in 3890 consecutive children (mean age, 5 years) presenting to primary care settings in Belgium. The authors recorded the presence or absence of the clinician's clinical impression that the child had a serious illness (based on history, observation, and examination) and the presence, absence, or uncertainty of the clinician's gut feeling (or intuitive impression) that the child was seriously ill despite clinical assessment of a nonsevere il…