Consensus, Disagreement, and Diagnostic Labels.

Diagnosis is a fundamental activity of the physician and most other health care professionals. Therapeutic efforts to treat, prognosticate, palliate, or counsel logically emanate from knowledge of the nature of the patient's disease, or at least, the symptoms and objective physical signs produced by that condition. In general, the medical model uses the term disease in referring to conditions with adverse outcomes (1). The manifestations of disease constitute the illness reported by the patient and observed by the physician in the course of taking a history and conducting a physical examination (2). A diagnosis is the label given the patient's illness or disease by the clinician. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]