The Sign (medicine) reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Sign (medicine)

In medicine, a sign is a feature of disease as detected by the doctor. It is therefore "objective", as opposed to the patient's experience (symptom), which is (relatively) subjective.

Examples of signs are elevated blood pressure, or abnormal appearance of the retina, or clubbing of the fingernails. These would generally be meaningless to the patient, but can prompt the doctor to look for certain categories of diseases to explain the patient's symptoms.

A number of signs are named after the doctors who first observed them:

• Babinski's sign
• Chvorstek's sign
• Trousseau's sign

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