BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES - Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie

complaints (the symptoms) to the physician, who then obtains further
information about the patient's symptoms, previous state of health, living
conditions, and so forth. The physician then makes a review of systems
(ROS) or systems inquiry, which is a set of ordered questions about each
major body system in order: general (such as weight loss), endocrine,
cardio-respiratory, etc. Next comes the actual physical examination and
often laboratory tests; the findings are recorded, leading to a list of
possible diagnoses. These will be investigated in order of probability.
Therapy (in Greek: θεραπεία), or treatment, is the attempted
remediation of a health problem, usually following a diagnosis. In the
medical field, it is synonymous with the word "treatment". A supportive
therapy is one that does not treat or improve the underlying condition, but
instead increases the patient's comfort. Supportive treatment may be
palliative care.
A therapeutic effect is a consequence of a particular treatment
which is judged to be desirable and beneficial. This is true whether the
result was expected, unexpected, or even an unintended consequence of
the treatment. In talk therapy a therapeutic effect can be brought on by
insight from the client that is caused by the clinician asking thoughtful and
discerning questions regarding the past and/or present moment. Freud's
main purpose in therapy was to make the unconscious conscious.
A treatment treats a problem, and may lead to its cure, but
treatments more often ameliorate a problem only for as long as the
treatment is continued. For example, there is no cure for AIDS, but
treatments are available to slow down the harm done by HIV and delay the
fatality of the disease. Treatments don't always work. For example,
chemotherapy is a treatment for some types of some cancers, which may in
some cases enact a cure, but not in all cases for all cancers.
Cures are a subset of treatments that reverse illnesses completely
or end medical problems permanently. A cure is the end of a medical
condition. The term may refer specifically to a substance or procedure that
ends the medical condition, such as a medication, a surgical operation, a
change in lifestyle, or even a philosophical mindset that helps a person
suffer. It may also refer to the state of being healed, or cured.
The proportion of people with a disease that are cured by a given
treatment, called the cure fraction or cure rate, is determined by
comparing disease-free survival of treated people against a matched
control group that never had the disease. If everyone treated for a disease
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