clinical
Meaning of clinical: The word draws one line above all others: between what is observed in a real patient and what is produced away from the bedside.
Definition of clinical
Clinical describes anything to do with the direct examination, diagnosis and treatment of patients, as opposed to laboratory or theoretical work. It qualifies places, such as a clinical setting; activities, such as clinical judgment; and evidence, such as a clinical finding, meaning something observed in a person rather than measured in a test tube.
What does the word signal in practice?
It marks information gathered from the patient directly. A clinical finding is something noticed during history taking or physical examination: a murmur, a tender abdomen, a change in speech. A clinical diagnosis is one reached from those findings without a confirmatory test, which is how many conditions are identified. Clinical judgment is the weighing that turns a set of findings into a decision. And clinically significant means a difference large enough to matter to a person, a separate question from statistical significance, since a very large study can detect a real difference far too small to be worth acting on.
What does it mean in research?
| Term | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Preclinical | Laboratory and animal work done before any person receives the treatment |
| Clinical study | Any research involving people, including purely observational work |
| Clinical trial | A study in which participants are assigned to receive something, so the effect can be attributed |
| Clinical practice | Ordinary patient care outside any research protocol |
A clinical study and a clinical trial are therefore not interchangeable, and the difference is whether anything was assigned. The boundary between preclinical and clinical is the first administration to a human being.
Why do clinical findings sit beside test results?
Because each answers part of a question and each fails in a different way. A laboratory value can be normal in someone visibly unwell, or abnormal in someone entirely well, since reference ranges describe a population rather than an individual. An imaging study shows structure without saying whether it is causing anything. An examination finding can be subtle, absent early, or masked by other conditions. What emerges is a judgment built from all of them, which is what the phrase clinical correlation on a radiology report is requesting: the images alone do not settle the matter, and someone who has seen the patient must decide what they mean.
Used in a sentence
The clinical examination findings were consistent with the results of the laboratory testing.
Good to know
A clinical finding, based on direct examination of a patient, is weighed alongside laboratory and imaging findings, since no single category of information is assumed to tell the whole story by itself.
Word origin
Where “clinical” comes from
From Greek klinikos, meaning of the bed, ultimately from kline, meaning bed, reflecting the origin of clinical practice at a patient's bedside.