Clinical findings: how to properly gather and interpret findings from the history and physical examination.
Etiology: how to identify causes for disease (including its iatrogenic forms).
Clinical manifestations of disease: knowing how often and when a disease causes its clinical manifestations and how to use this knowledge in classifying our patients’ illnesses.
Differential diagnosis: when considering the possible causes of our patient’s clinical problem, how to select those that are likely, serious and responsive to treatment.
Diagnostic tests: how to select and interpret diagnostic tests, in order to confirm or exclude a diagnosis, based on considering their precision, accuracy, acceptability, expense, safety, etc.
Prognosis: how to estimate our patient’s likely clinical course over time and anticipate likely complications of the disorder.
Therapy: how to select treatments to offer our patients that do more good than harm and that are worth the efforts and costs of using them.
Prevention: how to reduce the chance of disease by identifying and modifying risk factors and how to diagnose disease early by screening.
Experience and meaning: (for qualitative research) how to empathize with our patients’ situations, appreciate the meaning they find in the experience and understand how this meaning influences their healing.
Self-improvement: how to keep up to date, improve my clinical and other skills and run a better, more efficient clinical practice.
