Fever: Basic Mechanisms and Management

current medical practice. Successful strategies exist to motivate patient compliance. It is likely that training physicians in these strategies will allow them to address the issues of patient education and motivation more effectively. With the first four chapters, the author broadly describes the three-function approach. The next chapter considers ten common concerns of medical students when meeting patients. The following chapters explicitly address the structure of the interview: the opening, chief complaint and survey of problems, history of the present illness, past medical history, family history, patient profile and social history, review of systems, and mental status exam. Final chapters present information on understanding normal and maladaptive emotional responses of patients, how to deal with difficult interviews, and higher-order processes and skills such as clinical reasoning, mechanisms of defense, truth-telling, and nonverbal communication. An appendix illustrates a nine-session "model" course on medical interviewing. This book should become a standard text for all practitioners of medicine and related fields. Topics are addressed in a framework accessible to a wide audience of medical students, practicing physicians, and other health professionals. A major strength of the text is the inclusion of many sample conversations between doctor and patient. Appropriate and inappropriate responses are immediately seen in practice and assist the reader in identifying skills described by the author. Individuals in many other fields may also benefit from a thorough reading of this excellent book. Using the medical interview as an example, the author illustrates rules that could easily apply to all forms of human communication: listen, identify issues important to both the listener and the speaker, and respond to these issues in an appropriate, caring, and humane fashion.