Sometimes what initially appears to be a psychiatric illness turns out to be an organic illness, and vise versa. In our assessment of the patient with altered behaviour, it is critical to drill down and dissect apart the type of hallucinations a patient might be displaying, whether the demented patient is simply suffering from worsening dementia or alternatively has acute delirium (which carries a high mortality rate), and whether their somatic complaints might be due to depression or a psychotic psychiatric illness. In anticipation of our upcoming episode on Medical Clearance of the Psychiatric Patient Dr. Brian Steinhart tells the story of his Best Case Ever, reminding us of some of the clinical clues that can help us in our approach to the patient with altered behaviour, so that we avoid misdiagnosing a psychiatric illness with an organic one, or even worse, an organic illness with a psychiatric one...
The post Best Case Ever 48 – Organic vs Psychiatric Illness appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.
