Portal:Medicine

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Medicine is a branch of health science concerned with restoring and maintaining health. Broadly, it is the practical science of preventing and curing diseases. However, medicine often refers more specifically to matters dealt with by physicians and surgeons.

Medicine is both an area of knowledge (a science), and the application of that knowledge (by the medical profession and other health professionals such as nurses). The various specialized branches of the science of medicine correspond to equally specialized medical professions dealing with particular organs or diseases. The science of medicine is the knowledge of body systems and diseases, while the profession of medicine refers to the social structure of the group of people formally trained to apply that knowledge to treat disease.

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A medical guideline (also called a clinical guideline, clinical protocol or clinical practice guideline) is a document with the aim of guiding decisions and criteria in specific areas of healthcare, as defined by an authoritative examination of current evidence (evidence-based medicine). Guidelines usually include summarized consensus statements, but unlike the latter, they also address practical issues.

Clinical guidelines briefly identify, summarize and evaluate the best evidence and most current data about prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, therapy, risk/benefit and cost/effectiveness. Then they define the most important questions related to clinical practice and identify all possible decision options and their outcomes. Thus, they integrate the identified decision points and respective courses of action to the clinical judgment and experience of practitioners.

Additional objectives of clinical guidelines are to standardize medical care, to raise quality of care, to reduce several kinds of risk (to the patient, to the healthcare provider, to medical insurers and health plans) and to achieve the best balance between cost and medical parameters such as effectiveness, specificity, sensitivity, resolutiveness, etc.

The guideline-based approach to healthcare is a relatively recent one and has originated in the United States in the 90s. ...More...

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Image:Semipermeable membrane.png

Scheme of semipermeable membrane during hemodialysis. Red = blood, blue = dialysing fluid, yellow = membrane.

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The therapeutic index of a medication is a comparison of the amount that causes the therapeutic effect to the amount that causes toxic effects. Quantitatively, it is the ratio of the dose required to produce the desired therapeutic effect and the toxic dose. A commonly used measure of therapeutic index is the effective dose of a drug for 50% of the population (ED₅₀) divided by the lethal dose for 50% of the population (LD₅₀).