Word: symptom
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When children get sick, the commonest symptom is fever, and the first thing that most physicians do is try to get the temperature down. Despite the prevalence of this practice, it may be all wrong, says Stanford University's Dr. Alan K. Done in Pediatrics. When they rush to prescribe one of the hundreds of anti-fever drugs now marketed, physicians are attacking the symptom, not the underlying disease, and may be interfering with one of nature's defense mechanisms, says Pediatrician Done. And although some youngsters' miseries seem to be the result of, fever, other children...
There are some cases where a carefully chosen antifever drug is what the doctor should order after thorough diagnosis, Dr. Done concedes. But in general he agrees with Manhattan's late Physiologist Eugene F. Du Bois: "Fever is only a symptom, and we are not sure that it is an enemy. Perhaps it is a friend...
...exertion or excitement, his heart muscle is demanding more blood than its narrowed coronary arteries can supply. But it is not necessarily as simple as that, and angina can have some bizarre connotations, says Internist John Francis Briggs of St. Paul. The more doctors learn about the distressing symptom and its victims, the more complex angina becomes. To help get the next generation of practitioners started on the right track, Dr. Briggs lists 26 variations of angina in The New Physician, published for medical students. Some oddities...
...increasing anxiety when the compulsive routine is disturbed, and he soon feels guilty because he is "not working well enough," starts to worry inordinately about details, stuffs his pockets with memos. He cannot take a real vacation. He is a perfectionist-and rigid perfectionism is viewed as a symptom of unconscious guilt. By now, the businessman has something to feel guilty about: he has neglected his family, he feels isolated from his fellow men (especially subordinates), and he gets in a panic because he feels unable to love...
...stalklike neck. If the neck is extremely narrow, fecal matter forced into the diverticulum will stay there, setting up an ever-present threat of infection and making the condition harder to detect since the barium used to get X-ray contrast may not penetrate the diverticulum sufficiently. In the symptom-free stage of diverticulosis there may be dozens of small diverticula scattered along the colon...