Symptom, Sign and Side Effect Terms

Blood that escaped a broken vessel and has nowhere to go, changing color over days as the body dismantles it.

Cachexia is progressive muscle and fat wasting driven by an underlying chronic illness rather than by reduced food intake alone.

A condition lasting for more than 6 months in which a person feels tired most of the time and may have trouble concentrating and carrying out daily activities.

Pain that can range from mild to severe, and persists or progresses over a long period of time.

A state of unrousable unresponsiveness that resembles sleep from the outside and works nothing like it within.

How fast it came on carries more diagnostic weight than how severe it looks, since speed separates a reversible cause from a lasting one.

Straining and hard stool define it more than frequency does, because the normal range between healthy people is remarkably wide.

A muscle locking up on its own, briefly and painfully, most often in the calf, the foot or the abdominal wall.

The color depends on how much hemoglobin is traveling without oxygen rather than on the percentage, so anemia can hide it entirely.

The sound distresses the people at the bedside far more than it distresses the person making it.

Not stubbornness and not stupidity but a protective reflex, and one that often loosens on its own as the news becomes bearable.

Duration does much of the diagnostic work, separating a short lived infection from a long standing problem inside the gut.

Two people in identical circumstances can report very different distress, which is why it is asked about directly rather than inferred.

One word standing in for at least four different sensations, which is why the first question asked is what the feeling actually is.

Dyspepsia, or indigestion, is a group of upper-abdominal symptoms such as pain, burning, discomfort, early fullness, or uncomfortable fullness after eating.

Dysphagia is difficulty swallowing food, liquid, or saliva, ranging from mild discomfort to an inability to swallow safely.

When it comes on and in what position narrows the cause far faster than the sensation itself ever does.

The flat purple patch left when blood escapes under the skin, larger than a pinpoint spot and free of any lump.

Where the swelling sits, whether it pits under a finger, and whether it is one-sided are the details that separate the causes.

Emesis is the forceful expulsion of stomach contents through the esophagus and mouth; it is another term for vomiting.