Signs or symptoms?
The term symptom is traced back to the Greek symptoma, whose meaning is coincidence, fortuitous event, and to sympiptein which means "to happen " (from syn " together " and piptein "to fall ").
A symptom is now considered to be a subjective sensation of some disorder or disease that alters the normal feeling of oneself and one's body. It is therefore an event subjectively perceived and therefore not measurable.
Even if the two terms are often used without distinction as synonyms, the symptoms differ from the signs, which represent the objective elements detected by the doctor when examined by the patient himself. We therefore speak of a symptom as something subjective, perceived by the patient through the use of the senses, and a sign as an abnormality objectively interpreted by the doctor as an index of disease.
A syndrome is a set of signs typically associated with a disease and together they constitute a rather precise clinical picture.
