Oxford handbook of Clinical and Laboratory Investigation Tác giả: Drew Provan & Andrew Krentz Nhà xuất bản: Oxford University Press, Inc., New York Năm xuất bản: 2002 Trích: Lời giới thiệu With the increasing complexity of modern medicine, we now have literally thousands of possible investigative techniques at our disposal. We are able to examine our patient’s serum and every other body fluid down to the level of individual nucleotides, as well as being able to perform precise imaging through CT,MRI and other imaging technologies. The problem we have all faced, especially as senior medical students or junior doctors is: which test should we use in a given setting? What hazards are associated with the tests? Are there any situations where specific tests should not be used or are likely to produce erroneous results? As medical complexity increases so too does cost; many assays available today are highly expen- sive and wherever possible we would ideally like to use a test which is cheap, reliable, reproducible and right for a given situation. Such knowledge takes many years to acquire and it is a fact of life that senior doctors (who have attained such knowledge) are not usually those who request the investigations. In this small volume, we have attempted to distil all that is known about modern tests, from blood, urine and other body fluids, along with imaging and molecular tests. The book is divided into two principal parts: the first deals with symptoms and signs in The patientsection, because that is how patients present. We have tried to cover as many topics as possible, discussing these in some detail and have provided differential diagnoses where possible. We also try to suggest tests that might be of value in determining the cause of the patient’s symptom or sign. The second part of the book, Investigations, is spe- cialty-specific, and is more relevant once you know roughly what type of disease the patient might have. For example, if the symptom section sug- gests a likely respiratory cause for the patient’s symptoms, then the reader should look to the Respiratory investigations chapter in order to determine which tests to carry out, or how to interpret the results. The entire book is written by active clinicians, rather than scientists, since we wanted to provide a strong clinical approach to investigation. We have tried, wherever possible, to cross-refer to the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine, 5th edition, Oxford University Press, which provides the clinical detail omitted from this handbook. The symbol is used to highlight a cross-reference to OHCM , in addition to cross-referencing within this book. We would value feedback from readers since there will doubtless be tests omitted, errors in the text and many other improvements we could, and will, make in future editions. All contributors will be acknowledged individually in the next edition. We would suggest you e-mail us directly: [email protected]. Drew Provan Andrew Krentz 2002Vui lòng đăng nhập hoặc đăng ký để xem link.
