Chief Complaint

A handbook for physicians, residents and students in the emergency department to help manage patients. Evidence based concise algorithms.

At 57 years old, John Kerastas thought he was the poster child for fifty-year old healthiness: he competed in triathlons, rode in 100 mile biking events and ate a healthy diet chock full of organic vegetables. Then he discovered that he had a brain tumor the size of his wife's fist. His memoir chronicles the first year he spent addressing tumor-related health issues: preparing for his first operation, discovering a dangerous skull infection, having the infected portion of his skull surgically removed, learning about his substantial vision and cognitive losses, undergoing rehab and radiation treatments, and learning to live with his "new normal." According to Kerastas, the phrase "new normal" is the medical community's code words for "You're alive, so quit complaining." As his health changed, so did his sense of humor. He writes that his humor started out superficially light-hearted prior to the first operation; transmogrified into gallows humor after several subsequent operations; and leveled out as somewhat wry-ish after radiation and rehab. This is a surprisingly upbeat and inspiring book for anybody interested in memoirs about people dealing with personal crises, for patients trudging through rehab, for caretakers helping victims of serious illnesses, or for anybody looking for an unexpected chuckle from an unlikely subject. JOHN KERASTAS has worked at a global advertising agency, at several technology start-up companies and as a free-lance writer. Now, in addition to non-profit and charitable work, he spends his time blogging, speaking and writing about brain health, brain tumors and rehab. You can follow his blog or view his presentations schedule at www.johnstumor.blogspot.com.

With these short stories, Hatim Kanaaneh explores the changing, precarious, and ever-shrinking world of Palestinians living in Israel. As his village's first Western-trained physician, Kanaaneh had intimate access to his neighbor's lives, and he chronicles them here in a fictionalized collection of vignettes. His cunningly crafted stories reveal the struggles, triumphs, memories, and hopes of the indigenous Palestinian community living in a state that neither acknowledges their past nor supports their future. Following a diagnostic scheme used by physicians worldwide, each story is titled with the "chief complaint" of its protagonist. Taken together, the stories poignantly convey the indigenous Palestinian community's foundational chief complaint: its conflicted relationship with the state of Israel.

Organized by patients' chief complaints, this book fills the gap between traditional emergency medicine textbooks and bedside handbooks.

EMRA's convenient clinical guide equips you to handle the most common chief complaints efficiently and quickly throughout your shift. Use Basics of Emergency Medicine to ensure nothing is overlooked as you treat the adult patient population. This pocket-size guide is ideal for medical students, interns, off-service rotating residents, NPs, PAs, nurses ¿ and anyone caring for patients in the fast-paced world of emergency medicine.

Pediatric Complaints and Diagnostic Dilemmas: A Case-Based Approach contains 119 cases in 20 chapters that cover a common chief complaint. Each chapter opens with a definition of the complaint, moves to differential diagnosis with a table on the most frequent causes, and reviews the important questions in the history. Four to eight cases in each chapter illustrate how the same chief complaint can have different causes. Case presentations cover the history of present illness, past medical history, the physical exam, diagnostic studies, and the development of the complaint over time.

Provides a coherent and comprehensive account of the theory and practice of real-time human disease outbreak detection, explicitly recognizing the revolution in practices of infection control and public health surveillance. Reviews the current mathematical, statistical, and computer science systems for early detection of disease outbreaks Provides extensive coverage of existing surveillance data Discusses experimental methods for data measurement and evaluation Addresses engineering and practical implementation of effective early detection systems Includes real case studies