Welcome to Rheumatology! This Pressbook is required out of class preparation for our first interactive in-class session in this part of the course. After reading the text and attending the large group session students should be able to:
- Identify key history and physical exam findings in patients presenting with musculoskeletal complaints to differentiate between mechanical, inflammatory, neurologic and referred pain etiologies
- Compare and contrast the composition of normal synovial fluid with alterations observed in patients with infectious, inflammatory, degenerative and traumatic joint pathologies.
- Describe the spectrum of immune-mediated rheumatologic diseases to include autoinflammatory versus autoimmune disorders based on relative contributions of dysregulated innate versus adaptive immune responses
- Discuss the role of genetic and environmental contributions to disease pathogenesis in rheumatologic diseases