Postgraduate medical journal
-
Interstitial lung disease involves all areas of medicine as it often occurs in patients with comorbidities or as a consequence of systemic diseases and their treatment. Typically the physician is faced with a breathless patient, a diffusely abnormal chest radiograph, and a wide differential diagnosis. ⋯ Surgical lung biopsies have led to a new classification system for the range of histopathological patterns of disease that were previously known by the collective term cryptogenic fibrosing alveolitis. Problems persist in deciding when a surgical lung biopsy is clinically justified, in understanding the pathogenesis of these diseases, and in finding more effective treatments.
-
Controlled clinical trials are unusual in surgery, rare in urology, and almost non-existent as far as the management of urethral stricture is concerned. What data there are come largely from so called "expert opinion" and the quality of this is variable. None the less, the number of so called experts, past and present, is comparatively small and in broad principle their views more or less coincide. Although this review is therefore inevitably biased, it is unlikely that expert opinion will take issue with most of the general points raised here.