This winter's assortment of viruses...

This winter's assortment of viruses promises to fill the waiting chambers of family physicians with patients who have febrile diseases coughs, sore throats, runny noses, aches and pains, and other symptoms of boreals or flu. This issue of AFP provides a collection of patient information handouts that you may want to add to your survival kit for this winter. Starting in succession page 375, you'll find five handouts that can help your patients understand their respiratory symptoms and the appropriate treatment. single in kind handout explains the difference between flu and cooleds one discusses the influenza vaccines, undivided describes acute bronchitis, one explains the special use of antibiotics, and common discusses the causes and treatment of sore throat.

AFP's patient information collections are harvested from handouts previously published with individual articles. Our patient information editors search for handouts forward important topics, update them, and scrape together them into groups for your convenience. mostly of AFP's patient information handouts originally accompany the clinical review articles in the journal and are written by dint of the same authors as the article. These handouts go on through review and editing according to AFP's staff of physician editors. The handouts also walk through peer review by family physicians. The professional staff editors tailor the handouts to the appropriate reading horizontal for the average patient. prompts now believe that patient information should match the fourth-grade reading flat in order to best aid most patients. Our editors direct the eye for ways to simplify the language to this level

What you may not know is that many of AFP's patient information handouts are also available online at the American Academy of Family Physician's consumer-oriented Web site: familydoctor.org. Handouts that are placed upon the familydoctor.org site undergo regular review and updating. This site has lately been redesigned, and if you haven't visited there lately, you might want to take a anticipate There you will find printer-friendly versions of patient information handouts, Spanish versions for many handouts, and other resources. The site shows additional handouts on colds, flu and other respiratory infections, as well as many other topics.

In preparation for this season's onslaught of viruses, you may also want to read the "Practical Therapeutics" article forward the treatment of acute bronchiolitis associated with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) onward page 325. The author, Robert William Prasaad Steiner, MD PhD University of Louisville educate of Medicine, Louisville, Ky., notes that the peak incidence of RSV infection present itselfs in children younger than 12 month between the month of January and February. Bronchiolitis related to RSV is the leading cause of hospital admission in infants younger than individual year, and three months is the mean age of infants with RSV who are hospitalized.

COPYRIGHT 2004 American Academy of Family Physicians

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