Funk & Wagnalls Family Medical Guide

Előszó

Introduction
The uniqueness of Symptoms: The Complete Home Medical Encyclopedia is that it combines and interrelates a book of symptoms (Part 1) with an up-to-the-minute medical reference book of disease (Part 2).
The average person knows little about disease, but he does have a keen and intimate knowledge of symptoms. Outside of a few common disorders, he has no idea what he is suffering from. In Symptoms: The Complete Home Medical Encyclopedia, he will quickly know whether his symptoms are unimportant, potentially serious, or serious. In other medical encyclopedias he is obliged to look up his ailment first and then try to find his symptoms—a difficult and frustrating search.
In this book he has some of the best medical minds in the country to help him; he can identify his symptoms, resolve them into a specific ailment, understand the nature of his disease, and decide the best form of procedure.
The saying that a little bit of knowledge can do more harm than good is in itself a statement that does more harm than good. More light is surely better than less light. Our present understanding of the human body is certainly small compared to the ultimate total revelation of how the human body works, yet even with that little bit of knowledge countless numbers of lives have been saved. This book makes expert knowledge easily available to the reader.
We all know that a show of blood in the urine is a dangerous sign, which may be indicative of cancer and/or nephritis. But access to this book and a quick glance under the symptom heading Blood in the Urine will show that besides several forms of cancer and nephritis, blood in the urine is also a common symptom in such disorders as stones in the kidney or bladder, benign tumors in the kidney or bladder, prostate disorders, and vitamin K deficiency—not minor ailments true, but neither are they life-threatening. Such information is readily available in this book.
Another major objective of this book is to enlighten the reader about his own vast potential in fighting disease and maintaining ebullient good health. The aid of the physician, empowered by a great armamentarium of knowledge and constant new discoveries, is often lifesaving, but the patient's own efforts, armed with an equally great armamentarium of will, a thrust for life, and other profound inner resources, can often mean the difference between succumbing and survival.
iv Vissza