internal  medicine

 

Internal medicine is a vast and complicated field that is based upon strong scientific and clinical foundations. While certain pedagogic learning is unavoidable, an understanding of basic sciences, particularly pathophysiology, allows some meaning to be made of seemingly unrelated facts.

 

Any effort to provide a comprehensive review of internal medicine is destined to fall short of its goal. Despite this limitation, the authors have provided a framework for a working knowledge of internal medicine. It is not all inclusive but nonetheless provides the essentials of the subject in an easily read and well-organized format. Internal medicine cannot be fully learned in a year or two or in a lifetime.

 

The practice of medicine combines both science and art. The role of science in medicine is clear. Technology based on science is the foundation for the solution to many clinical problems; the dazzling advances in biochemical methodology and in biophysical imaging techniques that allow access to the remotest recesses of the body are the products of science. So too are the therapeutic maneuvers which increasingly are a major part of medical practice.

 

Yet skill in the most sophisticated application of laboratory technology or the use of the latest therapeutic modality alone does not make a good physician. The ability to extract from a mass of contradictory physical signs and from the crowded computer printouts of laboratory data those items that are of crucial significance, to know in a difficult case whether to treat or to watch, to determine when a clinical clue is worth pursuing or when to dismiss it as a red herring and to estimate in any given patient whether a proposed treatment entails a greater risk than the disease are all involved in the decisions which the clinician, skilled in the practice of medicine, must make many times each day. This combination of medical knowledge, intuition and judgment is termed the art of medicine. It is necessary to the practice of medicine as a sound scientific base.

 

Tact, sympathy and understanding are expected of the physician, for the patient is no more collection of symptoms, signs, disordered functions, damaged organs and disturbed emotions. He is human fearful and hopeful, seeking relief, help and reassurance. To the physician, as to the anthropologist, nothing human is strange or repulsive. The misanthrope may become a smart diagnostician of organic disease, but he can scarcely hope to succeed as a physician. The true physician has a Shakespearean breadth of interest in the wise and the foolish, the proud and the humble, the stoic hero and the whining rogue. He cares for people.    

 

Pain is the most common symptom of disease.

 

 

INTERNAL MEDICINE CONTENTS

 

      Cardiovascular System Diseases

 

      Respiratory System Diseases

 

      Hematologic Diseases

 

      Oncologic Diseases

 

      Gastrointestinal System Diseases

 

      Kidney and Urinary Tract Diseases

 

      Allergic and Immunologic Diseases

 

      Infectious Diseases

 

      Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases

 

      Rheumatic Diseases

 

      Fluid and Electrolyte Disorders

 

      Bone and Mineral Metabolism Disorders

 

 

Milestones in Internal Medicine

Gerhard Freiherr van Swieten 1700 – 1772 was founder of old Vienna Medicine School. He was physician of Austrian Queen Maria Theresia. He takes syphilis under control with a medicament he named it sublimat .

Joseph Skoda 1805 – 1881 was director of old Vienna Medicine School. He developed physical methods of diagnosis auscultation and percussion. Auscultation is the act of listening, especially to sounds from the heart, lungs, etc., as a part of medical diagnosis. Percussion is tapping a part of the body gently with a finger or an instrument as part of a diagnosis.

Joseph Leopold Auenbrugger 1722 – 1809 discovered in 1754 a kind of diagnosis method percussion. This method is also today in use.