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Abdominal PainWhat Happens in Primary Care?
Richard D. Blondell, MD
Arch Fam Med. 1996;5(5):287-288.
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ABDOMINAL PAIN is one of the most common symptoms seen in the medical office or clinic. Medical custom dictates that physicians try to attach a diagnostic Iabel to this symptom after obtaining the patient's clinical history and performing an examination. This traditional process has been divided into the following four steps: generation of a diagnostic hypothesis, refinement of the hypothesis, diagnostic testing, and verification of the diagnosis.1 However, many patients have a nonspecific clinical history and few or no physical findings, so no clear diagnostic hypothesis can be generated. What do primary care physicians do in these situations?
See also page 279
In this issue of the ARCHIVES, Klinkman2 uses a "policy model" of primary care decision making to describe how primary care physicians manage patients with nonspecific abdominal pain (NSAP) and to determine the costs of this management. For this study, an "episode of care" was defined
. . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]
Author Affiliations
University of Louisville Louisville, Ky
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