The Medical Evaluation of Psychiatric Symptoms (PDF)

This book provides psychiatrists and other clinicians who routinely evaluate psychiatric symptoms with the tools needed to rule out systemic medical conditions that could be causing those symptoms. It starts with an introduction that reviews why this text is needed and potential gaps in training that might contribute to the necessity for such a text. Each chapter thereafter focuses on a specific symptom which is first defined to ensure accuracy. A differential of common psychiatric and systemic medical conditions that can cause each psychiatric symptom is described. For each diagnosis, key history, physical exam, laboratory, and radiologic findings that help rule the condition out are provided. Screening tools that can help rule out systemic medical etiologies are also included. Where available from the literature, positive predictive values (PPVs) are provided to help readers to understand the likelihood that a negative finding or result indicates that a systemic medical disorder is not present. While individual aspects of this text exist in other formats, the comprehensive nature of our approach, from thorough descriptions of psychiatric symptoms, to means of ruling out potential systemic medical etiologies, is not currently available. This text will assist clinicians in ruling out systemic medical etiologies of common psychiatric symptoms, ensuring that patients are diagnosed correctly. Such an improvement in diagnostic precision has the potential to dramatically improve patient outcomes.