Medical insights

Provisional diagnosis: a diagnosis suggested and favored but not yet proved. Provisional diagnoses are most useful when one has a simple test to refute them (disprove the hypothesis) but they are often diagnoses of common conditions for which no perfectly specific and sensitive laboratory test has yet been developed (e.g., essential hypertension)

Objective: Capable of providing sufficient replicability to be used with a high degree of confidence observable by more than one reporter. Subjective: Incapable of consistently providing sufficient replication observable by only one observer.

Mutatis mutandis: (Latin) “Changing with change” (i.e., everything else changed accordingly).

Diagnostic criteria of anti phospholipid syndrome

The normal anion gap is between 6 and 14 mEq/L.

Simplified criteria for diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis

Pronator drift