Diagnostic Techniques

The collection now covers 17 symptom presentations, including motor and vocal/phonic functional tic-like symptoms.

Each symptom page now includes a Diagnostic techniques at a glance inventory: brief descriptions with source citations, evidence limitations and safety boundaries. These inventories include positive signs, descriptive observations, formal criteria and differential investigations; they are not 170 independently validated tests.

The collection contains 172 inventory entries across the 17 symptom sets. They have different purposes and levels of evidence: some are diagnostic comparisons, some describe symptoms, and others investigate alternative or coexisting conditions. Detailed assessment pages explain selected methods. All pages remain working drafts awaiting human and clinical review.

In this folder

• Functional Drop Attacks — event reconstruction, differential assessment, falls impact and follow-up, seven-entry inventory.

• Functional Paralysis — Severe Immobility: Assessment and Care Needs, Leg Comparisons in Functional Paralysis, Arm Comparisons in Functional Paralysis, Functional Paralysis Diagnostic Inventory.

• Functional Facial Symptoms — Spasm, Droop and Weakness — pattern-based examination, jaw/tongue/mouth assessment, eye symptoms and differential testing, preserved seven-entry inventory.

• Persistent Postural-Perceptual Dizziness — criteria and history, vestibular/differential assessment, questionnaires and everyday function, preserved eight-entry inventory.

• Functional Cognitive Disorder — clinical assessment, neuropsychology and validity, everyday function and OT measurement, models and checklists and eight original entries plus one dated research addition.

• Functional Cough and Upper-Airway Symptoms — expanded overview, clinical cough assessment, tic and somatic cough, laryngoscopy and ILO and the preserved seven-entry inventory.

• Functional Swallowing Symptoms and Globus — expanded overview, clinical assessment, FEES/VFSS, globus and oesophageal criteria and the preserved seven-entry inventory.

• Functional Speech and Voice Symptoms — expanded overview, cross-task comparison, stuttering and prosody, voice/laryngeal assessment and the preserved eight-entry inventory.

• Functional Visual Symptoms — expanded overview, acuity and fogging, field comparisons, optokinetic response and the preserved thirteen-entry inventory.

• Functional Sensory Symptoms — expanded overview, sensory mapping, splitting-sign limitations and the preserved seven-entry inventory.

• Functional Seizures — expanded overview, typical-event video-EEG, smartphone video, whole-event semiology and the preserved twenty-entry inventory.

• Functional Gait Disorder — expanded overview, sign-based comparison, swivel-chair assessment and the preserved thirteen-entry inventory.

• Functional Dystonia or Fixed Posturing — expanded overview and pattern-based assessment. The inventory preserves ten original entries and adds one dated exploratory method.

• Functional Jerks or Myoclonus — expanded overview and EEG–EMG assessment. All nine original entries remain in the inventory.

• Functional Tremor — expanded overview, with separate distractibility and entrainment drafts. All twelve original entries remain in the inventory.

• Functional Tics and Tic-Like Symptoms — history and motor–vocal assessment, criteria and uncertainty, measurement and everyday function, nine-entry inventory.

• Scan-Negative Cauda Equina Presentations — special overlap page for cauda-equina-like presentations without explanatory compression on imaging; this does not add an 18th FND presentation category.

• Diagnostic techniques index — browse every symptom-specific page and read how the signs should be interpreted and limited.
• Recovery techniques — find the separate collection about rehabilitation, treatment and symptom management after appropriate assessment.

[!IMPORTANT] A positive sign supports diagnosis only in the right clinical setting. New, severe, injured or substantially changed symptoms still need appropriate medical assessment.