Clinical History & Examination

A short guide to clinical medicine

This guide has been assembled with an eye towards clinical relevance. It represents a departure from the usual physical exam teaching tools which, in their attempts to be all inclusive, tend to emphasize the practical nature of patient care. As a result, students frequently have difficulty identifying what information is truly relevant, why it's important and how it applies to the actual patient. By approaching clinical medicine in a pragmatic and demystified fashion, the significance of the material should be readily apparent and the underlying principles more clearly understood.

I hope that this app helps to make the educational process both fun and rewarding. As the skills required of a physician cannot be learned from any single source, I encourage you to make use of as many other references as possible. This should reinforce basic principles and alert you to the fact that there are often many ways of achieving the same end (i.e. there is frequently no single right way of doing something). What follows, then, serves merely as an introduction. I have tried to capture those core behaviors that define clinical excellence and will have prolonged applicability, even in a technology driven world. The learning process continues (I hope) until the day you stop practicing medicine. There are always new techniques to learn and unusual findings to incorporate into your personal libraries of medical experience. However, unless you take the time to build a solid foundation, you will never have confidence in the accuracy and value of what you can uncover with a sharp mind, agile fingers and a few simple tools!.

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