Symptoms and syndromes of internal organ diseases, differential diagnosis. Volume 1

The guide presents the differential diagnosis for 124 syndromes or symptoms of internal organ diseases, including those that are rarely encountered. The information provided in the guide about basic pharmacotherapy will assist doctors in deciding on the appointment of comprehensive personalized therapy.
Basic pharmacotherapy (BPT) includes groups of drugs and individual medications using predominantly international names without specifying dosages, treatment regimens, indications, and contraindications. The guide consists of two volumes, which describe 124 syndromes. The first volume contains a list of abbreviations, while the end of the second volume includes object and eponymous indexes. We hope that the 4th, updated edition of the guide will be useful for doctors of various specialties, especially therapists and general practitioners (family medicine) in solving complex diagnostic tasks and selecting personalized therapy. Over the years of communicating with readers of the guides, we have found that they serve as teaching aids for students, interns, and clinical residents.
Creating these guides, we aimed to fulfill one of the tasks of S. P. Botkin (1867): "...The clinician-teacher sets himself the primary task of conveying to students the method that would enable the young practitioner to subsequently independently apply his theoretical and medical knowledge to individual patients he encounters in his medical career".
The necessity to create a revised guide is explained by the complication of diagnosis due to polymorbidity, blurring, and atypical disease courses, the expansion of the list of so-called rare diseases, and the impact of polypharmacy on the course of diseases. Furthermore, it is necessary to take into account the emergence of new methods of diagnosis and treatment. In this regard, each reissue of the guide is accompanied by an update of its content. The basic principles of conducting differential diagnosis remain unchanged.
All this requires from the therapist not only a large volume of factual knowledge but also the ability to think clinically, to correlate numerous clinical, instrumental, and laboratory data in the process of diagnosis and treatment, to formulate an individual, often very complex diagnosis, and to prescribe personalized therapy. The use of this guide by doctors of almost all specialties will not only facilitate the differential diagnostic and treatment process but will also help shape the style of clinical thinking inherent in the Botkin school of therapists.
Editors: K. N. Kryakunov, N. N. Lukashevskaya.