Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 32-year-old woman is evaluated for a 2-month history of weight loss, abdominal cramping, and loose stools. Her stools are malodorous, but she has not noted any blood associated with her bowel movements. Although her appetite is good, she has lost 3.2 kg (7.0 lb). She has an 8-year history of diffuse …
Back in my first year of blogging, I wrote a post, titled “A Day Without a Diagnosis,” about the way we now spend most of our time “managing” chronic diseases, some of which weren’t even considered diseases when I went to medical school.
That’s not how all my days go nowadays: A week ago I had a day of some very real doctoring.
My first patient of the day was …
We’ve all been there. You’re in medical school, sitting in a lecture hall — maybe the course is pathology — and for the first time since starting your studies, you’re actually learning about real diseases, not just benzene rings and the Krebs cycle. You’re furiously note-taking, and you reach back to work out a kink in your neck. There it is! A palpable, enlarged lymph node. You have lymphoma. You …
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 42-year-old woman is evaluated for recurring pain and swelling of the left knee and right ankle that began 5 months ago. At that time, she also had an episode of conjunctivitis as well as dysuria, both of which resolved spontaneously. The joint pain and …
Labels matter. We quickly form judgments based on them. If we hear someone called lazy, the label “lazy person” attaches in our mind even though we may not have even met the person. The same is true for labels given to various medical conditions. If the label for an illness uses language such as “fatigue,” we abstract from our experience and think we know what it’s like to suffer from …
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 25-year-old woman is evaluated during a follow-up visit for a 6-month history of diffuse muscle and joint pain above and below the waist, fatigue, and difficulty sleeping. She has a 2-year history of hypothyroidism treated with levothyroxine. Her only other medication is hydrocodone-acetaminophen, which has …
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