Preliminary Interview

The diagnostic value which is cited at the beginning of each section as reference value is entirely arbitrary and is based on our own personal experience.

Diagnostic value = 10

A fundamental part of any approach, this is when the man with prostatitis refers his symptoms to the attending physician and decides whether to entrust in him.
The symptoms which the physician must investigate have already been described.

I recommend that at this stage doctors be particularly patient with cases of prostatitis. Enquiries about symptoms must be repeated for symptoms alone and in association and they should be investigated in depth. In our outpatients clinic the Symptoms Questionnaire(see below) is administrated once and then again by two different operators. Often the person in front of the doctor is a mature or a young man who has lost faith in the medical profession, who may even have been frightened in many preceding consultations which have failed to help him and who may feel his trust has been misplaced. Sometimes he will tend to underrate some aspects of his disease and overestimate others. It is up to the attending physician to put things into a more balanced perspective.

SYMPTOMS QUESTIONNAIRE

Symptoms Questionnaire* (Perugia University)