INTERNAL MEDICINE

Internal medicine is an all-embracing specialty that aims to provide a complete general medical assessment of the patient that takes into consideration assessments made from other specialties.
It is a vast and complicated specialty in the medical field with sub-specialisations that deal with individual organ diseases but also a range of internal organs. These “super specialisations” are closely linked with the development of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques that are particularly useful in the field of nephrology, haematology, cardiology, vascular angiology, neurology, etc.
The procedure for the internist visit begins in the same manner as the general visit and specialist visit. It begins with the analysis of the patient’s case history (i.e. the patient’s medical history and the diseases present in the immediate family, physiological habits) and is followed by a proper general clinical evaluation, with the carrying out of physical examination manoeuvers designed to highlight those aspects or clinical signs that can help reach an initial diagnosis, upon completion of the anamnestic data. For this reason, it is called a clinical diagnosis that takes the clinical reasoning into account and proceeds with this reasoning to the differential diagnosis of diseases.
The complete internist evaluation also involves the so-called instrumental diagnosis by carrying out instrumental investigations, directly or indirectly, that can help to properly diagnose or confirm a diagnostic hypothesis.