Understanding of pathophysiology study
How should you approach the production of a clearly written paper that will demonstrate your understanding of pathophysiology and enable you to relate your studies in this course to disease occurrence and development in your patient?
1. Choose a patient with whom you have (or have had) contact in your work and who has a disorder that is of interest to you. You will need information concerning the patient’s history (both before and during the course of his/her disease progression). This information can be elicited by talking to the patient and also talking with the patient’s physician(s). You will maintain confidential the name and any identifying characteristics of the patient.

2. Once you have determined the disease and the patient to which you will direct your study, read everything you can find in the clinical literature, your textbook, the Internet, etc. about the disorder. This part of your study MUST INCLUDE articles from clinical journals (eg., The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the AMA, Nursing Science Quarterly, etc) and you can also cite scholarly internet sources of information pertinent to the disorder. ALL sources are to be of a scholarly nature. DO NOT INCLUDE articles, pamphlets, or internet sites intended for the uninitiated lay person.