Non-Canonical Principles of Diagnosis and Management: A Resident Perspective

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. There are certain principles of diagnosis and management that I've come to embrace as a junior and subsequently as a senior medical resident. The hospital physician likely practices most of these principles in some form or another. I'm not claiming them as fruits of my own intellectual prowess, but instead synthesized observations based on concrete clinical examples that I've come to use in my day-to-day approach in the internal medicine patient. They are non-canonical formulations of logic in the clinical setting that may help the overnight resident for an increasingly complex patient population.These principles focus on the idea of multifactorial patient presentations, competing management strategies, establishing diagnostic dominance, recognizing negative diagnostic interference and embracing the re-establishment of homeostatis as the role of the clinician. These principles may provide a reliable armamentarium of logic by which to approach situations overnight, especially those that are complex and unfamiliar.