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| The Section of Rheumatology provides all
of the adult clinical rheumatology expertise and services to The University
of Chicago Hospitals. The Section has an inpatient service team that is available for consultations every day of the year. The team consists of an attending rheumatologist and rheumatology trainee usually accompanied by senior medical students and medicine residents. The team, along with the support of radiology and pathology and the other clinical specialties, attends patients with diseases ranging from gout to vasculitis. Clinical rheumatology is primarily an outpatient specialty and the Section sees its patients at the state of the art DCAM (Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine) facility. The DCAM is the major outpatient facility for the University of Chicago Hospitals. It has up-to-date radiology and outpatient surgery suites and all of the medical and surgical specialties. The rheumatology clinic is adjacent to the orthopedic and neurology clinics and close to our bone and joint radiology unit, the cast room and hand therapy. All x-rays are digitalized and available on monitors throughout clinic. There is a weekly x-ray conference together with our bone and joint radiologists, where we review the difficult and interesting radiographs. The rheumatology clinic attends referral patients for consultation and long term follow-up patients with chronic rheumatic diseases. Clinical research is conducted in the clinic so that study patients can be observed and monitored closely. The clinic is staffed by nursing personnel and research coordinators. There is a rheumatology infusion room adjacent to the rheumatology clinic and a more spacious transfusion/infusion room on another floor. We evaluate patients with all types of the rheumatic diseases. There is special interest in late onset rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, the pulmonary involvement in patients with mixed connective tissue disease, difficult to treat gout and scleroderma. In addition there is a weekly "injection clinic," for patients requiring joint aspiration or intra-articular corticosteroid instillation. All of the clinics serve as teaching clinics for medical residents and students. The physicians at all levels of training and expertise routinely "share" interesting and complex patient problems. This allows us to draw on each other's expertise. The Section of Rheumatology clinic has 12,000 patient visits yearly. |
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