 Hey everybody, Dr. O. In this video, we're going to talk about signs, symptoms, and syndromes, just so you're clear with the terminology associated with these three words. So real quickly, signs are going to be objective things that can be measured or visualized. Symptoms are subjective things that a patient needs to tell you. So let's start with signs. So signs again, something that can be directly measured or observed. So this would be maybe loss of range of motion or lab values, abnormalities on EKG, these would be examples of signs. Whereas symptoms being subjective, the patient needs to tell you about them. So even fatigue, even pain, right, would be an example of a symptom. And then think about, like, if someone's having a heart attack, they might talk about, like, an impending sense of doom. Well, you can't measure impending sense of doom, just like you can't really measure pain without asking a patient on a 0 to 10 pain scale type of thing. So that is signs versus symptoms. I think signs objective can be visualized, can be measured, symptoms subjective. The patient has to explain them to you, which is why the patient history is so important. Lastly, we have syndromes. So syndromes are when you put a group of signs or symptoms together that accompany a disease. So I wouldn't say it's a disease, right? So with syndromes, you really can't diagnose them, but they're a collection of signs and symptoms. So sometimes there's some confusion here. Like, for example, down syndrome is not actually a syndrome. That is a disease that has a clear cause. But premenstrual syndrome might be a good example of a syndrome. So it's a collection of symptoms that comes along with that, but can be caused by a variety of causes. But my favorite syndrome, at least to explain this principle, is irritable bowel syndrome. So when I was in college, they believed that irritable bowel syndrome was the physical manifestation of stress, and that certainly could play a role in it. But we now know that irritable bowel syndrome is probably caused by dozens of things. Some of them are dietary, some would be stress. There's lots of other factors. And there's also different types of irritable bowel syndrome. There's the type that causes constipation, the type that causes diarrhea, and the type that causes you to bounce back and forth. So when you really can't put your finger on something, but there's a pretty clear collection of signs and symptoms, that's going to be called a syndrome. All right, so that is signs, symptoms, and syndromes. I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.