One of my teachers at the university was Professor G.S. Burd, a prominent Russian neurologist and author of a textbook that was used by half the country. It was his example in those distant student years that instilled in me that a professional neurologist is capable of almost magical diagnostics! I remember sitting in class, and suddenly the face of some employee appeared in the doorway:

– Georgy Serafimovich, Georgy Serafimovich, may I see you?! Or we won't have time!

- Yes, I forgot! I'll be right back.

He gets up, says: “Follow me!”, and we walk down the corridor of the ancient First Grad Hospital in Moscow. We come to a bed in the corridor, on which lies a long, sturdy old man about eighty years old. He was brought in last night. He's in a coma, all the signs of the impending end. Some kind of stroke, but no definitive diagnosis. And Burd starts examining him...

Oh, it was like shamanism. All that was missing was a tambourine. He circled, came from different sides, stabbed with a needle, tapped with a hammer, scratched, opened his eyes and looked at them for a long time, took a absorbent cotton and rubbed it on the eyeball, studied the tongue. The action went on for about forty minutes. And when we were already bored, the professor straightened up and said to the resident frozen in tense expectation:

- Well, write. Here are two foci: one with a diameter of millimeters 2-3 on the right side of the plumbing, and the second - in the area of the striatum on the left. He dictated with dimensions and exact localization. And we... went numb. It was mind-blowing! That's what a real neurologist is all about. In this issue, we will discuss some issues of practical neurology that doctors of different specialties may encounter.

Prof. I.V. Egorov