How Physicians Think Assessment

There will be two parts to your assignment: (1) Your notes regarding the disease that you are representing as a patient and (2) your report as the physician diagnosing your patient/partner.

Notes as patient

Hand in the notes that you put together from your research for your specific disease. The notes do not have to be in essay form. They can be brief bullet points but they must contain sufficient information for a chief complaint, subjective answers to your physician’s questions, and responses to clinical tests ordered by the physician.

Notes as physician

You will be taking notes as you are interviewing your interview. These notes should follow chief complaint, subjective, objective thinking. Keep these notes (you will hand them in). But you will write a report from these notes. In this report, you will follow this rubric:

	Chief Complaint: What does the patient say? How do you use this complaint to start asking your questions?

	Subjective: List the questions you asked and the responses from your patient? What can you conclude from these answers? (Remember even negative answers are important because they help you to eliminate possible diseases (That is the basic idea of differential diagnosis). Explain your reasoning from these subjective responses. Think about possible causes of the disease from these responses (genetic, infectious, trauma).

	Objective: Order your clinical tests. But for each, you must explain your reasoning-what information do you expect to get and how you would use this information. Then present the results from your clinical test even if they are normal. What can you conclude from the clinical tests (What part of the body is affected by disease? How does the body show abnormalities? What does it indicate about the disease-infectious, cancer?)

	Differential Diagnosis: After researching your patient’s responses, you should be prepared to make two diagnoses, a primary and an alternative. For primary, what condition or disease do you hypothesize your patient has? Use the information from your interview to explain your reasoning. You also need to present a secondary diagnosis, in case your primary turns out to be incorrect. Explain your secondary diagnosis.

	Be sure to hand in your notes from the interview in addition to your report.