Making Sense Of Medicine

The first 72 hours following assessment and admission to the emergency department are crucial to a patient's care. As the medical practitioner on duty, you need good diagnostic skills and the ability to formulate a quick, safe and appropriate management plan. Making Sense of Acute Medicine is here to help. This book is the perfect introduction to accurate diagnosis for medical students, newly qualified doctors and anyone intimately involved with the delivery of acute medical care. By focusing on the decision-making process in relation to common clinical presentations, Making Sense of Acute Medicine will assist you to: take an accurate history and examine the patient with a focused approach make appropriate investigations requests formulate suitable management plans

The more we know about medicine, the more we realize that many health questions have no one true answer. Realizing this, and thinking carefully about how medicine asks patients to treat their conditions, leads us to some questions. How reliable are the guidelines that might form the basis of doctors’ advice? Is it wrong, after all, to base an approach to medicine on patients’ preferences? And, given that there is often a distance between the treatment a doctor advises and what a patient would like to do, how do we bridge the gap—especially in a health culture of inequality, technical proficiency, and increasing costs? In practical, engaging, narrative-driven chapters about common health conditions that millions of Americans are familiar with—depression and high blood pressure, arthritis and diabetes—Dr. Zackary Berger of Johns Hopkins demystifies the often bewildering disconnect between patients and doctors and asks us all to think more clearly about how best to protect and cure the human body.

This 1998 book contains historical essays about how diseases change their meaning.

Do you want to know what a parametric test is and when not to perform one? Do you get confused between odds ratios and relative risks? Want to understand the difference between sensitivity and specificity? Would like to find out what the fuss is about Bayes' theorem? Then this book is for you! Physicians need to understand the principles behind medical statistics. They don't need to learn the formula. The software knows it already! This book explains the fundamental concepts of medical statistics so that the learner will become confident in performing the most commonly used statistical tests. Each chapter is rich in anecdotes, illustrations, questions, and answers. Not enough? There is more material online with links to free statistical software, webpages, multimedia content, a practice dataset to get hands-on with data analysis, and a Single Best Answer questionnaire for the exam.

The practice of clinical medicine is inextricably linked with the need for moral values and ethical principles. The study of medical ethics is, therefore, rightly assuming an increasingly significant place in undergraduate and postgraduate medical courses and in allied health curricula. Making Sense of Medical Ethics offers a no-nonsense introduction to the principles of medial ethics, as applied to the everyday care of patients, the development of novel therapies and the undertaking of pioneering basic medical research. Written from a practical rather than a philosophical perspective, the authors call upon their extensive experience of clinical practice, research and teaching to illustrate how ethical principles can be applied in different 'real-life' situations. Making Sense of Medical Ethics encourages readers to understand the principles of medical ethics as they apply to clinical practice; explore and evaluate common misconceptions; consider the ethics underlying any medical decision; and as a result, to realize that a good appreciation of medical ethics will help them to practise more effectively in the future.

This text provides practical guidelines on how to make sense of and interpret the evidence that is available, with information on how to avoid straying beyond evidence into conjecture, supposition, and wishful thinking. It covers size, trial design, harm as well as benefit, and health economics and management evidence.

The first time I read the medical consent and authorization. it had registered in my mind simply as a legal document. Now I began to understand what it meant. It was a letter of ultimate love and trust. (Schucking. 1985. p. 268) Ever since Karen Ann Quinlan slipped into permanent unconsciousness in 1975 and her father agonized publicly over whether she should remain indefinitely on a respirator (In re Quinlan, 1976), the desires of patients, their families, and their friends to limit the application of apparently limitless medical technology have been a pressing concern for ethics, law, and public policy. Ms. Quinlan's case contained nearly all the elements of the problems we still face: vague, general, but sincere prior oral statements suggesting that she would not want continued treatment; a family attempting to do what they saw as best for her; and physicians uncertain whether to use medical judgment alone (and if so, what the "right" medical decision was), to preserve her life at all costs, or to honor the family's interpretation of their daughter's choice. Most ironically, once she was removed from her respirator, she did not die. Karen Quinlan - like dozens of other names made famous by court decisions, newspaper stories, and television evening news - has come to symbolize a tangled knot of issues surrounding the end of life and who controls it.