A mechanism is provided in a data processing system comprising at least one processor and at least one memory, the at least one memory comprising instructions which are executed by the at least one processor and configure the processor to implement a medical treatment recommendation system. The medical treatment recommendation system receives a first patient electronic medical record (EMR) corresponding to a first patient. The medical treatment recommendation system analyzes the first patient EMR to identify a span of content in the first patient EMR that is a candidate hypothetical statement within the patient EMR. The medical treatment recommendation system verifies whether or not the candidate hypothetical statement is an actual hypothetical statement based on an analysis of a corpus of other content. The medical treatment recommendation system controls an operation of the medical treatment recommendation system with regard to the span of content based on results of the verifying. The controlling causes the medical treatment recommendation system to ignore the span of content in response to the results of the verifying indicating the candidate hypothetical statement to be an actual hypothetical statement. The medical treatment recommendation system generates a treatment recommendation based on the operation of the medical treatment recommendation system with regard to the span of content. The medical treatment recommendation system outputs the treatment recommendation for use in treating the first patient.