Diagnosis and treatment planning.

It must be emphasized that any examination of a supposedly healthy patient must be thorough and careful, for the early detection of disease demands that minute and inconspicuous deviations from the normal be evaluated carefully. The detection of disease occurs during the examination procedure, and from a practical point of view, it appears that clinicians employ at least the following three types of examination, depending upon circumstances: the comprehensive examination; the screening examination; and the emergency or limited examination. Although the latter two types represent a justifiable compromise with respect to the comprehensive examination in light of limitations of time or resources, the general inaccessibility of the patient in veterinary practice suggests that one should make the most of the opportunity for examination when it presents itself. A complete, thorough examination is not, by definition, a time-consuming and expensive procedure, particularly if there is no disease present. Exam-related expense is more a function of a differential diagnostic effort once clinical abnormality is detected, and then it is certainly justified. The term "diagnosis" originates from a Greek word meaning to distinguish or to discern. For the clinician, it refers to the process of identification of a disease by investigating, in all their manifestations, the signs and symptoms presented by the patient. The word diagnosis describes not just a "disease identified," but the process by which the identification is made. The procedure for making a diagnosis includes the following four primary steps: Collection of the facts. Analysis of the data for relative importance. Correlation between synthesized data and descriptive features of suspected diseases. Selection of the disease that best explains the collected facts and apparent disturbed physiologic processes of the patient. The process of diagnosis usually results in the naming of a disease. It is well to remember that a name is only a shorthand method of describing a set of signs and symptoms characteristic of a particular disease state. Emphasis should always be focused upon the clinical facts collected, not on the name of the disease selected. Oral disease in animals results from an extremely diverse variety of environmental, dietary, and genetic circumstances. The clinical appearances of the disease process can vary considerably within a single species and may vary enormously from one species to another, particularly considering the contrasts between some captive environments and other natural habitats.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)