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Friday, October 26, 2007

differential diagnosis

Yesterday, we had a bedside teaching with one of the consultant. The consultant told us to take history of presenting complaint and try to diagnose the disease. We were taking turn for asking appropriate questions. After few minutes, we realised that this is not a common disease.

The patient has weird episodes which are induced by doing heavy physical activity. Each episode has the same symptoms. The patient will feel dizzy, palpitation, headache, pale face, feeling of anxiety and sometimes shortness of breath. No fever, nausea, vomitting, or pain. The episodes last for few minutes and will only stop after resting. This has been happening for few months.

We are thinking of epilepsy or migraine or myocardial infarction but further questioning shows that this is not the case.

The consultant keep on asking us what is the differential diagnosis for this patient. We were baffled by the signs and symptoms. Somehow during the tutorial, an episode of House ran into my mind. I've seen this before in one of the episodes of House and the signs and symptoms are similar.

I know the disease but I can't exactly remember the name. Few minutes later, one of my groupmate said the name of the disease. Apparently most of us were thinking of House but we forget the actual name of the disease.

This is quite a rare occasion for me to diagnose a patient from watching House. This is an interesting week for me :)

12 comments:

Minci said...

have you known what it is yet?
do you remember which season or rough outline of episode?

Hafiz said...

it is from season 2, episode 1....here is the link for the summary of the episode :)

aria ayumi said...

dunno why, i luv to watch House. and also ER. eventhough i hate biology when i was in secondary school. mungkin sbb kene byk baca kot. tp, klw tengok tv, baca sarikata dia je. hehehe

Hafiz said...

to tell you the truth, i'm not that good in biology either. Selalu dapat markah tinggi di dalam Fizik, Matematik dan Matematik Tambahan tetapi biologi hanya dapat markah rendah sahaja :)

Anonymous said...

i loved biology in school dulu especially coz it was taught by the cutey cutey miss esther daniel. tapi sebab nak rebel against father's wish, refused to take up med :D

so, it's a case of life-imitating-art eh? (if house can be called an art, that is..)

Minci said...

read the first para. discovered that I havent watched it yet, so I think im going to watch it first before reading the synopsis again.
thanks for the link.

Hafiz said...

mosh, minat biologi rupanya yer.

the cases mentioned in House are usually quite rare and hard to find in the real life situation. So, it is nice whenever you meet someone with those rare conditions.

minci, that episode is quite interesting. Hopefully you will be able to enjoy it.

Sarah Mohd Shukor said...

salam hafiz..

what a great influence :) but it helps in the other way. stay cool while making diagnosis ok :)

Hafiz said...

thank you....sometimes medical tv shows can be helpful :)

Anonymous said...

house tu ada narcissistic personality disorder kan kan kan...kalau tak pun maybe trace aje :P

Hafiz said...

agree.. he has a bit of those and that what made him an interesting TV show :)

Anonymous said...

Very nicce!