eli5: How do doctors decide wether their patients tell the right location of their pain and how they experience it so that they can make a decision?
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I’m a 2nd year med student so I think I’m partially qualified to answer this. We always “trust, but verify.” First step is to talk to the patient, that gives a general idea of what we are working with, and depending on what we get, we can even sometimes diagnose the illness right there because it all comes down to pattern recognition. If the history is unclear, we do some simple physical exam maneuvers (like pushing on your stomach in 3×3 grid to localize pain, lifting your leg straight up to see if it hurts your back, etc). These will almost always narrow down the illness to a handful of choices. If none of these are super conclusive (which doesn’t happen often), we do imaging and lab tests.
In nearly all cases, doctors already know with history and physical exam alone what is wrong with the patient, the remaining tests are just for verification. That’s how doctors in the past have always done their job, done everything by the bedside with no electricity. And that’s sort of still how they are training us these days. We should be able to list top 3 diagnoses just by a 10min conversation and physical exam on the patient, and then do all the advanced testing to double check. I still have 2 more years to go, but I can already pick up some simple symptom patterns.
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