History-Taking Skills in Rheumatology

Abstract

History taking in rheumatology is the most important skill needed for proper handling of a patient with a rheumatological complaint. Obtaining a good history will help you to reach almost 90% of your diagnosis. However, history taking is mostly depending on experience and practice rather than theoretical recall. Here in this section, we provide you with the most important points in history taking you should use while dealing with rheumatological patients. There is an approach to history taking in rheumatology started as with the classical approach in history taking like any other disease. There is much focus on rheumatological aspects related to the onset of joints pains, patterns, symmetry of joints involvement, number of joints involved, and ultimately rheumatology review of systems. We summarized the classic symptomatic correlations with certain rheumatological diseases. We present briefly a suggested approach to your presentation of the entire case.