INVESTIGATING AND DIAGNOSING YOU
To treat you successfully we must find out what is going on with your biochemistry
Disease names are just labels e.g., fibromyalgia, ‘new daily persistent headache’, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. I could go on and on.
The ‘diagnostic label‘ really refers to a collection of symptoms (what a patient suffers from), clinical findings (what the clinician finds on examination) and laboratory findings. The clinician then prescribes the standard treatment to reduce or eliminate symptoms, and hopefully to reduce the pace of disease progression. The standard approach does not drill down to explore what is happening biologically so as to attempt to fix that.
When investigating and diagnosing you at Drummartin Clinic we try our best to find the root all of all your symptoms.
How we investigate
We will investigate your medical problems as comprehensively as possible, using the best and most sophisticated means at our disposal.
A comprehensive medical history
We need you to send us a carefully completed medical history before we offer you an appointment – we need to consider if it is likely we will be able to help you. We will tell you not to use any identifiers beyond your initials.
This written medical history is a starting point. At your first consultation, we will make sure we have all pertinent details of your medical history recorded.
A thorough medical history is still one of medicine’s best diagnostic tools and nowadays often relegated to second place. At this stage,areas needing investigation and future treatment options ought to be apparent.