Becoming a Consummate Clinician (What Every Student, House Officer, and Hospital Practitioner Needs to Know) ||

With hospital medicine growing rapidly in both scale and complexity, the learning curve for students is steeper, while experienced physicians are often called upon to act as mentors and caregivers in areas outside their primary fields of expertise. __Becoming a Consummate Clinician__, an exciting new book in the series Hospital Medicine: Current Concepts, describes in practical terms how clinicians and students can think more critically and act more insightfully in this era of information expansion and time compression. Developed for hospital-based clinicians and physicians-in-training, the book provides a road map for navigating key challenges in real-life medical practice related to assessing, integrating, and presenting clinical information. Clearly formatted and easily accessible, the book: * Fully integrates and emphasizes error avoidance and reduction * Highlights uses and limitations of algorithmic and evidence-based medicine in medical decision-making * Details effective strategies for looking and “re-looking” at biomedical data * Explains essential do’s and don’ts of medicalpractice, from patient history and exam to differential diagnoses * Describes best practices and pitfalls of gathering, processing, and communicating medical information * Presents strategies for attending physicians to develop the critical thinking skills of their trainees Featuring real-world clinical examples, this concise, down-to-earth text is written to help both practitioners and students improve their overall clinical performance, and learn to communicate effectively with members of the caregiving team. Content: Chapter 1 How (Not) to Present a Patient History (pages 11–36): Chapter 2 Reexamining the Physical Exam (pages 37–66): Chapter 3 How (Not) to Order and Present Lab Tests (pages 67–80): Chapter 4 Seeing is (Almost) Believing: The Importance of Reviewing Data (pages 81–91): Chapter 5 “Worsts First”: How to Frame a Differential Diagnosis (pages 93–102): Chapter 6 Clinical Queries: Asking the 3? Key Questions (pages 103–112): Chapter 7 E = MC3: Error Reduction Equals Motivation Times Communication to the Power of 3 (pages 113–129): Chapter 8 Evidence?Based Medicine: What and Where is the Evidence? (pages 131–144): Chapter 9 Caution! Dangerous Biomedical Semantics at Work (pages 145–163): Chapter 10 Some Second Opinions: Outliers, Hoofbeats, and Sutton's (Flawed) Law (pages 165–172): Chapter 11 A Sixfold Path: From Data to Knowledge to Understanding (pages 173–180): Chapter 12 What is Disease? What is Health? (pages 181–194): "The Consummate Clinician offers hospital-based physicians an organizing framework for coping with daily challenges both in patient care and in teaching. The book describes in a highly formatted, easily accessible way exactly how physicians and physicians-in-training can think critically and act decisively in this age of medical information overload. Special emphasis is on (1) error avoidance and reduction - a topic that has long been championed by hospitalists, (2) efficient practice management for best patient outcomes and improved cost control, (3) the use of evidence-based medicine, and (4) improving communication among and between physicians and other staff in the hospital setting. Using real-world clinical examples and scenarios, the book focuses on essential topics, many of which tend to fall between the cracks of print and electronic resources. Pearls and pitfalls of gathering, processing, and communicating medical information are presented, but more than these, this book is meant as a kind of clinical GPS--a way of helping hospital-based physicians find their clinical coordinates and keep their bearings in the face of new challenges and uncertainties. In addition to the clinical scenarios featured throughout, additional mini-cases are collected at the end of the book. The over-arching goal of this new resource is to enrich the way hospital-based physicians think about diagnosis, therapy, and prognosis, especially at the warp-speed of "ward world," which increasingly lurches between the frazzled and the frantic"--Provided by publisher.