The etymology of case takes us to the Latin casus . The term refers to an event , a fact or a matter . Clinical , for its part, is an adjective that refers to the practice of medicine , generally linked to the study of patients and the treatment of their ailments.
The concept of clinical case , in this framework, can refer to the detailed presentation of a patient's health status. It is the particular expression of a phenomenon in the organism of an individual or a group of subjects.
Generally, the clinical case includes some peculiar characteristic that gives it special interest to doctors or teachers. That is why the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) recognizes the notion as a morbid process that usually escapes the usual.
Clinical cases involve a description of what happens to a person during the course of some type of illness . This description is not only formed with the doctor's observations and the patient's manifestations, but also includes information obtained through the diagnostic procedures and the treatment developed. Monitoring of the individual's evolution must be included in the clinical case.
The study of clinical cases contributes to the training of doctors, the exchange of experiences, the evaluation of techniques and the recognition of new diseases. This is because the clinical case allows us to reveal an unforeseen link between a symptom and a disease, discover an atypical presentation of the disease in question or discover side effects of a treatment, to name a few possibilities.
This is linked to the fundamental objectives of the clinical case, since the first of them is to allow doctors with less experience to learn from veterans and even from themselves thanks to being able to evaluate certain situations that appear in the course of their work. with patients. It is important to note that clinical cases have been the subject of study, both by students and doctors, since ancient times.
Another objective of the study of clinical cases is to contribute to improving and modifying the practice of clinical medicine ; Precisely, if new challenges were not presented, situations absent in theory books, science would stagnate, it would become a petrified knowledge lacking in mystery. Luckily, this could not happen since the vocation always leads human beings to seek new frontiers.
Although on the one hand the clinical case is a tool that allows us to understand in greater depth the characteristics of known diseases, it also opens the doors to the discovery of many others that until now had been ignored due to lack of evidence .
Similarly, thanks to the study of clinical cases it is possible to propose new diagnostic and therapeutic techniques to test, as well as discover side effects of certain drugs, both beneficial and adverse. It is not uncommon to find news of this type in the media that calls into question the effectiveness or, worse still, the safety of the consumption of certain medications.
This also happens with some procedures that were believed to be risk-free, such as certain surgical interventions, and that one day begin to fall into disuse because they have caused a worrying number of adverse reactions. Curiously, it is not so common to find the opposite situation, that is, with a public statement that focuses on a series of benefits of a medication or procedure that have not yet been appreciated.