clinical medicine

English

Etymology

Collocation of clinical + medicine, originating in a mere sum of parts but having an idiomatically established meaning slightly beyond the etymonic one alone; etymonically, clinical medicine is what happens in the clinic, but by direct logical extension, it is what happens at the point of care generally, whether literally inside a clinic (e.g., doctor's office, outpatient clinic, physiotherapy center, hospital) or at home (a private home or a communal home such as a nursing home).

Noun

clinical medicine (uncountable)

1. (medicine) The principal subset of medical practice, comprising all aspects of medicine that happen at the point of care, as opposed to the aspects that happen in the clinical laboratory, imaging center, medical school classroom, data center, or other nonclinical settings; thus, for example, the radiology service and the pathology service are conceptually differentiable, such that the clinical components of the diagnostic process (e.g., history, physical examination, point of care testing) are categorizable as distinct from the nonclinical ones that interface with the clinical activity (e.g., radiologic interpretation, histopathologic analysis, data analysis).

Hypernyms

• medicine

Coordinate terms

• academic medicine (which entails clinical medicine, medical education, biomedical basic science, and biomedical applied science)
• laboratory medicine (which entails most serology, most NAATs such as most PCR, and many other lab tests)
• pathology (e.g., cytopathology, histopathology)
• radiology
• surgery (not always wholly distinct from clinical medicine, but usually differentiable in a practical way from nonsurgical care in nonsurgical venues)