Ask you questions about your past health and whether you smoke or have been exposed to other things that can irritate your lungs. If there is a chance you could have COPD, it is very important to find out as soon as you can. This gives you time to take steps to slow the damage to your lungs.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease which is largely made up of the tobacco-related conditions emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

Several ways have been suggested to diminish the diagnostic error that occurs if diagnosis is based solely on the clinical picture of suspected appendicitis. In fact appendicitis is a disease, which can mimic most of the causes of abdominal pain as well as some of the chest diseases. Despite new x-ray techniques, CT scans and ultrasounds, the diagnosis of appendicitis can be quite challenging.

allergist or immunologist can diagnose your allergies using allergy skin tests, which show if your immune system reacts to specific allergens. You can also test your reactivity to common allergens using a home allergy test.

When evaluating patients with chronic fatigue of unknown origin, physicians can use the following definition of CFS as a guide. This detailed definition was developed for research use under the leadership of the Centers for Disease Control. It was published in the "Annals of Internal Medicine" in March 1988. Because the disease is still poorly understood, however, the outlined criteria should be considered provisional.

A doctor will base his or her diagnosis of SAD on whether you have been depressed in the winter and recovered in the spring or summer for at least 2 years in a row. These dramatic mood swings in response to changes in seasons are what differentiate SAD from nonseasonal depression.

A:The area of increased sweating is determined by a simple method. A weak solution of iodine is applied to the skin under the arms and then a dusting of powdered starch is applied over the iodine. This mixture will turn blue in the areas of excessive sweating allowing the physician to know where to inject the BOTOX®. These blue marks will be cleaned off after your treatment.

The diagnosis of ADHD can be made reliably using well–tested diagnostic interview methods. Diagnosis is based on history and observable behaviors in the child’s usual settings. Ideally, a health care practitioner making a diagnosis should include input from parents and teachers.

Your doctor can diagnose BPH by asking questions about your symptoms and past health and by doing a physical exam. Tests may include a digital rectal exam, which lets your doctor feel the size of your prostate, and a urine test (urinalysis). In some cases, a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test is done to help rule out prostate cancer. (Prostate cancer and BPH are not related, but they can cause some of the same symptoms.

Currently, the best method to diagnose PKD in living cats is by ultrasounding the kidneys. Other radiological modalities have been used, but have proven to be generally less accurate and more costly. However, even the most skilled sonographer using the best equipment cannot be 100 percent accurate in diagnosing PKD via ultrasound, since the resolution afforded by ultrasound is not sufficient to detect very small cysts.

The doctor's main tool in diagnosing epilepsy is a careful medical history with as much information as possible about what the seizures looked like and what happened just before they began. A second major tool is an electroencephalograph (EEG). This is a machine that records brain waves picked up by tiny wires taped to the head. Electrical signals from brain cells are recorded as wavy lines by the machine.

Your health professional will examine your skin to look for melanoma. If he or she suspects melanoma, a biopsy of the affected skin is needed to make a diagnosis. For this, your health professional will remove a sample of tissue, and a pathologist will examine it under a microscope to check for cancer cells. If the biopsy shows melanoma, more testing (such as a sentinel lymph node biopsy) may be necessary to determine whether the melanoma has spread to the lymph nodes.