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Diagnosis is the identification or recognition of an illness or a disease by examination of the symptoms.
In order to make a diagnosis, your doctor will collect all available information (History taking) by questioning, and then make physical examinations or clinical examinations of the patients.
Diagnosis can be provisional or differential - this is a tentative diagnosis, it is when you are thinking about two or more particular disease.
Diagnosis can also be final or definitive - this is when your doctor is very sure of which particular disease you are suffering from. It's the correct diagnosis.
To arrive at correct or definitive diagnosis you might sometime need to supplement your history is taken and physical examination with the other investigations which sometimes requires extensive equipment and facilities.
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After the disease has been recognized the appropriate treatment is prescribed and executed. At this stage, a Prognosis of the disease can be made.
What is Prognosis?
Prognosis: Is a forecast or prediction of the likely progress, duration, and termination of a disease. It can be good or bad.
It is said to be good when a normal physiologic function will be restored and it is said to be bad if it terminates in an unwanted state.
General Diagnosis Procedure
A typical physical examination will include a careful health appraisal by an examining physician, including a detailed health history of the patient and study of the patients body appearance and functions, an X ray of the chest area, head area, an electrocardiogram of the heart in some cases, and laboratory analysis of blood and urine samples, other appropriate procedures, such as Pap test smear, may be added to routine.
Since no two persons are exactly alike and the differences between patients are likely to increase with advancing years, the examining doctors interest in a set of signs and symptoms may vary with different patients as he pieces evidence together to come up with a complete evaluation of a particular patient.
Specialties and Their Diagnostic Procedures.
If a definite diagnosis cannot be made on the basis of the medical history and preliminary physical examination, more specialized tests are employed.
These are usually made under the direction of a specialist. This specialist and some of the most important of their diagnostic procedures. There are literally hundreds of them and we are mentioned in the next article.
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