Dear students,
The purpose of the interactive application "Virtual patients" is to help you create and improve your skills to solve clinical cases. It will help you understand how biochemical principles are involved in clinical practice.

Imagine you have a real patient in a real situation. You must make the diagnosis or understand the mechanism of the disease and if possible, prescribe treatment. The cases selected are simplified to a certain extent to make them appropriate for the level of preclinical students. Therefore the treatment has not yet been strongly accentuated.

The computer will give you information about any step of the problem solving, will ask questions, suggest decisions, and make comments. You communicate with the computer through the keyboard and the mouse, following the instructions given when necessary. Variety of outcomes (more or less successful ends or compulsory exit in case of serious mistakes) can occur depending on your mastery.

In most steps you have to choose the right decisions from the suggested ones. You can be also asked to make your own decision, e.g. to write down the diagnosis or another key word. In this case you have three attempts to enter your answer correctly. If you do not know the answer, the program will stop. As a last resort the link "Key words" (present only in the left menu of this file) will help you.

The frames, dividing the screen into three parts, are movable. The upper part is for navigation. The current situation or question and the suggested decisions are presented on the screen (right frame). The left frame is for the comments on the chosen decision. You can move the frames with the mouse to see better the whole text or the illustrations. It is recommended to use the full screen of the window.

You cannot run more than one case at a time. If the case does not open, check it up and close previously opened windows with cases.

The background colour of the frames varies according to the answer of the student. When the decision is correct, the background to the comment becomes green as if giving the student the green light to go ahead. If the decision is wrong, it becomes pink as a sign of warning. Red is used in case of compulsory exit.

The program is started by the button "Solving the case". While working you have access to the files "Help" and "Case history". The button "Help" allows you to see the normal values of the substances tested in blood or urine. Try to use the whole information without undertaking useless actions. But if you are not sure what to answer or what to do, you can pass through all suggested decisions. The comments will help you understand where your error is.

You can stop the interactive program at any moment by clicking on the button "Exit".

When you solve the case, at the end of the program, clicking on the button "Additional information" allows you to read more about the disease.

You can also see how many of your decisions are correct, wrong, or useless. So you can get an idea of the level of your professional effectiveness and efficiency. As you are still beginners, it is more important to be convinced that biochemical theory is essential to your future clinical practice.