Many medical nouns need adjectives

Last week on twitter I wrote a series of tweets about necessary qualifiers.  Here are the tweets which represent an incomplete sample of the problem: 1st tweet on  importance of qualifiers w/ “diagnoses” Do not label the patient as COPD exacerbation without saying why: Differential includes acute bronchitis, pneumonia, pneumothorax, left side heart failure, anemia, opiates, PE etc. 2nd qualifier tweet – Never tell me the patient has CKD without giving me the stage and the cause.  Corollary – do not give me the eGFR for patients with AKI – the estimates do not work with increasing creatinine levels 3rd qualifier tweet – when the patient has diabetes mellitus – identify type and duration  – type I and type 2 have some different associated problems – duration suggests looking for certain complications.  Mention known complications 4th qualifier tweet – don’t label the patient CHF – rather heart failure with modifiers – systolic dysfunction (provide the ejection fraction), or valvular or preserved ejection fraction or right heart failure – perhaps some others – 5th qualifier tweet – cirrhosis – secondary to (alcohol, hep C or whatever), previously known complications and report MELD score with labs These examples are very important, at least in my mind.  Just in case I have not made my point, the reason for these examples comes from seeing lists of “diseases” in the past ...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs