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Collins Medical Dictionary and Health Guide

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Introduction

Medical care in the twenty-first century is extraordinarily complex and sophisticated. As consumers of health care, it is easy to become confused and frustrated as you try to wade through the jargon and terminology used by your health-care providers and by the media -- often in seemingly contradictory ways. But when it comes to your health and that of your family, you want and need accurate, clear information that can help you better understand a symptom or ailment or that can assist you in making informed decisions. The goal of this dictionary and health consumer guide is to help increase your understanding and knowledge of health-related terms, conditions, procedures, and tests so you can, in turn, improve the quality of your life and that of your loved ones.

Here is a handy, comprehensive, and user-friendly resource to help you decipher and make sense of unfamiliar terms and medical-related matters in language that everyone can understand. Our goal has been to use language that is not so simplistic that it loses the essence of the material being presented, but not so technical that it cannot be grasped by a layperson. To that end, the dictionary and tables have been designed to equip you with the vocabulary and knowledge to better understand your health-care providers and to ask them appropriate questions.

This book is divided into two sections. The first and main section is a dictionary. It consists of more than ten thousand words and phrases and their definitions -- terms you may encounter every day while dealing with health-care providers or medical facilities, or when interacting with any of the numerous forms of media that report health-related information. For your convenience, pronunciations are provided, as are plural forms of words in some cases. The second section is a consumer health guide, which consists of sixteen tables that cover a wide range of information you can use to maintain or improve your health -- from vaccination schedules for infants to how to prepare an advance directive. These two sections complement each other: there are cross-references to the tables throughout the dictionary sections, and terms and phrases you will find in the consumer health guide can be found in the dictionary.

Health care is an ever-evolving and organic field, presenting us with new terms, diseases, procedures, and products and fresh ways to look at familiar ones. Our understanding and appreciation of these things need to change as technology and research bring new information to the forefront. This book can help you and your family navigate through this information and feel more confident when you must confront health-care issues. At the same time, it is critical that you establish a relationship with licensed health-care practitioners for both preventive health maintenance and treatment whenever necessary.

The inclusion of any trademarked and/or patented items in this book does not constitute an endorsement. They are included solely because they enjoy widespread use or are terms you may encounter. Similarly, exclusion of any such items from the book does not mean they are in any way inferior to the ones that are mentioned.

Excerpted from Collins Medical Dictionary and Health Guideby Edward Burns Copyright © 2006 by Edward Burns. Excerpted by permission.
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