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Glossary of Medical Terms
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Demand
A need or desire for a product or service. Price, availability and quality
of the product all affect demand. Demand for health services is often
difficult to assess and surveys of willingness to pay may be necessary to
estimate its scope or extent.
Determinant
Any factor, event, characteristic, or other definable entity that brings
about change in a health condition or other defined characteristic.
Diagnosis
The process of determining health status and the factors responsible for
producing it; it may be applied to an individual, family, group or
community. The diagnosis should take into account etiology, pathology, and
severity of the clinical state.
Direct Observations or Performance Audits
A traditional approach for giving a firsthand assessment of skills and
performance with immediate feedback to the student. The student is
observed performing a complete history and examination which provides the
best possible opportunity for the observer to make multiple judgments over
a period of time in a variety of clinical situations. Use of observation
checklists, training the raters and agreed-upon standards increase
reliability and validity of these methods over the use of global rating
forms which require additional resources. This approach has an advantage
over most new methods.
Discipline-Based Approach
Teaching of the individual classical medical disciplines such as anatomy,
biochemistry, pathology, surgery or community medicine as separate
educational building blocks. It is expected that this approach lays the
foundation for contact with patients which tends to occur later, after
completion of the basic science course. In this approach, it is left to
the student to put together the knowledge gained in each discipline to
form an overall picture of medicine.
Disease
A general term used to refer to any departure from health in which a
patient suffers. It can be defined as disorder of bodily function or
destructive processes in organs, organs' systems or in an organism with
recognizable signs and symptoms, and in many cases a known cause. The
words disease , illness and sickness are used
often interchangeably but are not synonymous. Rather, whereas disease
relates to a physiological or psychological dysfunction, an illness
is the subjective state of a patient who feels unwell and sickness
encompasses a state of social dysfunction, such as the role that the
individual assumes when ill.
Doctor
See Physician
Domain
A scope of knowledge, skills, competencies and professional
characteristics which can be combined into one cluster and should be
learned during undergraduate medical studies.