Every defect is a treasure Quality problems that result in adverse outcomes provide opportunities for quality improvement. A series based on actual examples of care. A patient under treatment with clozapine for chronic paranoid schizophrenia dies of overwhelming sepsis. A 48-year-old male seeks treatment for chronic paranoid physician–patient discussion, enrolls the patient in the schizophrenia...

Polyuria-polydipsia syndrome (PPS) compared three-pathologies: nephrogenic or central diabetes insipidus and primary polydipsia. The initial approach considers different causes, it requires a complete evaluation of the fluid-status support by physician. diagnosis must exclude frequent abnormalities. Clinical case: A 57-year-old male during his hospitalization documents polydipsia polyuria with ...

Woldemar Mobitz, an early 20th century German internist, analyzed arrhythmias by graphing the relationship of changing atrial rates and premature beats to AV conduction. Through an astute mathematical approach, he was able to classify second-degree atrioventricular block into 2 types, subsequently referred to as Mobitz type I (Wenckebach) and Mobitz type II (Hay). Type I AV block was most often...

From its inception, medical artificial intelligence has grappled with the problem of uncertainty. Early systems such as MYCIN [4] and INTERNIST [13] used an informal description of probabilistic knowledge, while more recent efforts [9,17] have taken a more formal approach to capturing the uncertainty. Formal methods provide precise and justifiable reasoning methods to support the conclusions th...

Localized radiation therapy directed to the spleen and other sites, supplemented by a whole-body radiation technique, appeared to increase survival time in the chronic leukemias. In recent years the alkylating drugs have provided a more convenient form of "whole-body effect", because treatment can be taken at home and yet observation maintained.Small or medium field radiation therapy remains th...

Within the last 10 years there has been increasing recognition of the frequency of spontaneous occlusions of the carotid arteries as a cause for neurologic deficit, and several reports of successful therapy instituted early in the disease have appeared. Since many patients with symptoms due to carotid occlusion will be seen initially by the general practitioner or internist, increased awareness...