Algorithms in Differential Diagnosis (ePub)

This is a book for medical students and first-year doctors who wish to learn how to approach a patient's symptoms, and sharpen their skills of clinical reasoning and diagnosis.

Fifty-four presenting symptoms are discussed, covering approaches and conditions across various medical and surgical disciplines. Each chapter sets out the thought process behind history, examination, and investigations for a symptom, providing a systematic and practical algorithm to distinguish one differential from another. The reader will gain not only a functional approach to patients' presenting complaints, but also learn how to better organize and apply medical knowledge in diagnostic reasoning.

• Introduction
• Heart and Lungs
• Gut and Abdomen
• Kidneys and Urinary Tract
• Brain, Nerves and Senses
• Blood
• Endocrine and General Physiological Disturbances
• Skin and Subcutaneous Tissues
• Joints and Muscles
• Female Genital Tract

• This book covers common presenting complaints in adult patients, cutting across different clinical specialties — from internal medicine subspecialties, to surgical disciplines, orthopaedics, and gynaecology
• To help students and junior clinicians approach differential diagnosis with smart strategies. this book provides the basic schemata, which categorizes possible diagnoses in terms of their clinical picture, identifies key differentiators, and discusses the reasoning process how to comprehensively consider all possibilities yet narrow down to the most likely diagnosis
• Every chapter provides a clinical vignette, with a discussion on how the suggested algorithm can be applied to the clinical scenario
• The book is written with input from 15+ senior subspecialty experts