What are symptoms and how do they relate to diagnoses?
A. This is a very important question. A symptom is a change from normal that suggests the presence of an illness or disease. For example, a sore throat or a cough are symptoms suggesting possible illness or disease of the throat. Unexpected sadness or sudden panic are symptoms that suggest the possibility of psychiatric illness. Note that the presence of a particular symptom of itself does not establish the presence of a particular illness. That is to say, there are many possible causes of a sore throat or a cough. The physician’s task is to determine which of the candidate illnesses is present and which are not. The list of candidate illnesses is referred to by physicians as the “differential diagnosis” for that symptom. Similarly, depression or panic are symptoms that can be found in many different psychiatric illnesses, and consequently depression and panic as symptoms have lists of candidate illnesses, or “differential diagnoses”, that must be carefully considered before determinin
