A computer-assisted telephone interview survey was carried out in the City of Maryborough to determine the prevalence and sources of advice for self-reported skin conditions. Of the 443 adults contacted, 416 (94%) agreed to participate in the study. One hundred and fourteen people (27%) reported having one or more skin ...

In June 1998, the Professional Conduct Committee of the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom (the body which regulates British doctors) concluded the longest-running case it has considered this century. Three medical practitioners were accused to serious professional misconduct relating to 29 deaths (and four survivors with brain damage) ...

OBJECTIVE: To analyse and quantify that portion of one General Practioner's prescribing that is outside his/her control. DESIGN: Detailed analysis of one General Practioner's General Medical Services prescribing over a three month period during 1996. SETTING: A Group Practice in Sligo, Ireland. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The number and cost of ...

Carbamazepine is a drug commonly prescribed by medical and dental practitioners for the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia. Although included in the Dental Practitioners' Formulary, general dental practitioners (GDPs) rarely prescribe this medication. Those GDPs who do prescribe carbamazepine may need to liaise with the patient's medical practitioner for haematological monitoring. ...

OBJECTIVES: To develop a profile of rural surgeons for comparison with profiles of rural general practitioners in the light of shortages in the rural medical workforce. DESIGN: Rural surgeons were surveyed by a postal questionnaire in November 1997. PARTICIPANTS: Members of the Provincial Surgeons of Australia residing in towns with ...

OBJECTIVE: To shed light on attitudes towards loyalty conflicts among general practitioners (GPs) compared with related specialists such as gynaecologists and paediatricians. DESIGN: A postal questionnaire containing three case histories with arguments for and against different ways of acting in loyalty conflicts. The medical problems of the clinical cases varied, ...

OBJECTIVES: To ascertain the extent of the use of acupuncture and the characteristics of general practitioners using acupuncture. DESIGN: Secondary analysis of 1996 Health Insurance Commission data on claims by all non-specialist medical practitioners for Medicare Benefits Schedule items for an attendance where acupuncture was performed by a medical practitioner. ...

We can expect to live long enough to develop multiple disorders and receive multiple medications in the face of shrinking medical resources and changing philosophical approaches to aging. Clinicians will be faced with a rapidly aging and increasingly complex patient population. Neurologic diseases account for over ninety percent of those ...

In this paper general practitioners' (GPs') somatic-psychosocial attributions of fatigue are examined. The attribution process during medical consultations was studied by relating the GPs' judgements of the somatic-psychosocial character of their patients' fatigue to patient-related characteristics, on the one hand, and medical-consultation characteristics on the other hand. The study was ...

AIM: To determine the use of influence techniques by pharmaceutical representatives in their encounters with medical practitioners. METHOD: We identified six influence techniques from the marketing literature which are thought to be commonly used by sales people. These have been termed the principles of reciprocity, friendship/liking, commitment/consistency, social validation, authority, ...

BACKGROUND: Accidents and injuries are important preventable causes of morbidity and mortality for travelers. This study was designed to investigate the prevalence of advice given by general practitioners (GPs) on personal safety, health and travel insurance, and finding medical assistance abroad in the event of misadventure or ill health. METHOD: ...

BACKGROUND: In Queensland, Australia, patients with work-related injuries must receive a referral from a general medical practitioner to receive treatment from such "nontraditional" practitioners as physiotherapists, chiropractors or osteopaths, even though these nontraditional practitioners are primary care providers outside of the workers' compensation system. The Chiropractors' Association of Australia (Queensland ...

AIM: To determine whether the requirements of the reaccreditation programme of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners (RNZCGP) have changed the amount and type of continuing medical education (CME) done by the participating general practitioners. METHOD: A written questionnaire was sent to 200 randomly selected general practitioners doing ...

To identify the medications general practitioners consider for the treatment of persistent isolated cough, we undertook a postal questionnaire survey of a sample of general practitioners in east London. Fewer than 10% indicated that they never prescribed for such cough. About 70% sometimes considered antibiotics and/or bronchodilators in all age ...

Six open-ended questions from a survey of 1271 randomly selected medical practitioners on active voluntary euthanasia (AVE) and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) was examined. In spite of some extreme written views for and against the procedures, the majority of practitioners were considered, concerned, sympathetic and troubled about AVE and PAS.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the influence of general practitioners' outpatient medication on nonformulary drug requests in university hospitals. METHODS: During a period of 1 year every nonformulary drug request at the Göttingen University Hospital was analysed (reason for request, drug class). A second analysis examined whether the introduction of a new ...

In the Netherlands all patient on the list of a GP can present with all health problems in all their stages of development at any time, and more than 80% of all complaints presented to a GP are resolved by him or her. Many of these problems have psychosocial aspects. ...

Sugar in liquid medicines is a factor in dental caries for many children. There has been an increase in the availability of sugar-free medicines in recent years, but they need to be prescribed specifically, because most generic liquid medicines still contain sugar. The object of the present study was to ...

OBJECTIVE: Medical education generally is so complex today, compared to just 50 years ago, that we unfortunately brush over the education of common conditions and their management in favour of more esoteric and complicated disease. Otitis media (OM) is no exception, and now more than ever, we must strive to ...

The nineteenth century was important for medicine in Britain because the foundations of a united medical profession were laid by the Medical Act of 1858. This established the General Medical Council which had the responsibility of maintaining a list of qualified medical practitioners. This not only protected the public from ...

Many third-party payers try to deny benefits for dental sedation and general anesthesia. The term "not medically necessary" is often applied to these services by third-party payers. The label is poorly defined and varies from payer to payer. This paper uses original practitioner and patient opinion surveys to support the ...

Dentists in the state of Illinois who possess a permit to administer sedation or general anesthesia were surveyed. A 71% response rate was achieved. Of the respondents, 86% held permits for deep sedation/general anesthesia and 14% held permits for parenteral conscious sedation. By practice specialty, 84% were oral and maxillofacial ...

Reparative therapy has come to generically define talking cures that claim to change an individual's homosexual orientation to a heterosexual one. Although other treatment modalities have also promised to "cure" homosexuality, the history of reparative therapies has become inexorably linked with that of psychoanalysis. This paper reviews the history and ...

A research project was undertaken to design an electronic medical record system which will cater for the specific needs of South African general practitioners and their unique requirements. The project was launched by sending out a questionnaire to general practitioners in the Free State, trying to determine their specific requirements ...

This paper aims to document the experiences of some women doctors who graduated between 1924 and 1940. It highlights some of the difficulties they encountered in establishing themselves as respected medical practitioners and briefly describes the social context in which they worked. The data for this paper were gathered through ...

This article describes 19 semi-structured interviews with medical practitioners working in the Northern Territory of Australia. The interviews explored the practitioners' perceptions of the differences between Aboriginal and Western beliefs about disease causation and death. The interviews further explored how these perceptions affected the practitioners' communication of mortality information and ...

The medical specialist emerged as a critical gatekeeper in a study of information sources used by family practitioners in New Zealand. Thirty-four practitioners in the Wellington region were interviewed and their responses examined to ascertain the extent to which five criteria influenced their choice of information sources for clinical decision-making. ...

AIMS: To report patterns of medical contact in a representative sample of Pacific people attending the general practitioner. METHODS: The data were drawn from a survey of general practice in the Waikato region representing a one per cent sample of all weekday encounters. In total, 12,833 patient encounter forms were ...

Autoimmune progesterone dermatitis is a rare clinical entity that may be seen by the family practitioner, gynecologist, or dermatologist. Recognition of the entity is paramount in the therapy of this easily treated condition. We report a case of a 36-year-old woman with a recurrent facial dermatitis of many months' duration. ...

Awojobi Clinic in Eruwa, Nigeria, a hospital in a rural setting, is used as a case study. Medical practitioners hoping to practise surgery in a rural setting should be able to carry out certain essential life-saving procedures. The curricula of surgical training in medical institutions are examined to determine their ...

OBJECTIVE: Increasing exposure of undergraduate medical students to rural practice is a key component of the national effort in Australia to redress the rural workforce shortage. For this exposure to be successful, willing cooperation of current rural general practitioners is essential. To date there has been no formal assessment of ...

The READER acronym describes a simple easily applied method of critical reading, an important skill for general practitioners (GPs). The aim of the study was to evaluate an abstract using the READER method, and to compare the appraisal by GP registrars in Southern Ireland with those of GP registrars in ...

OBJECTIVES: To assess general practitioner knowledge of banned substances in sport. METHODS: Postal questionnaire sent to all general practitioners in West Sussex. RESULTS: Only 55 (35%) of those who responded (157 in total) were aware that guidelines are to be found in the British National Formulary, and 19 (12%) of ...

We compared the level of generic prescribing in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and England and surveyed the views of Irish College of General Practitioners members. In 1993, generic drugs (pure generics and branded generics together) comprised 17.4% of total dispensing in the General Medical Services Scheme, significantly less ...

OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of deprivation on variations in general practitioners' referral rates using the Jarman underprivileged area (UPA(8)) score as a proxy measure. DESIGN: Cross sectional survey of new medical and surgical referrals from general practices to hospitals (determined from hospital activity data). SETTING: All of the 183 ...

Conceptually, clinical guidelines and professional autonomy have a paradoxical relationship. Despite being the quintessence of medical knowledge at the corporate level, guidelines diminish the clinical autonomy of individual practitioners, and therefore threaten medicine's justification for its autonomy. Theorists have argued that professional autonomy will be retained through elite dominance of ...

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether endoscopists and general internists agreed with the characterization of appropriateness for endoscopy of various clinical scenarios, as previously reported by the RAND Corporation. DESIGN: Mail survey. STUDY SAMPLE: All endoscopists in western Canada and a random sample of general internists who did not perform endoscopy. METHODS: ...

Clinical biochemistry departments can be a valuable source of clinical advice for further investigations and the need for referral to specialist clinics. This paper outlines the pattern of clinical advice sought by general practitioners in a district hospital setting, and addresses some of the issues regarding seeking such advice and ...

This paper argues that during the 'golden' age of medical reform in the first half of the nineteenth century in the Cape Colony there was significant differentiation within the medical profession which contributed to a slow and uneven process of professionalization in spite of comprehensive and early legal regulation under ...

The purpose of this paper is to explore briefly the nature, development and implications of the relationship between medical practitioners and life assurance companies. The aim is to elucidate the development both of the medical profession and the life insurance business--two important aspects of economic and social change in the ...

OBJECTIVE: 1. To identify the level of acceptance of the principle of British Medical Association (BMA) participation in the formulation of practice guidelines for complementary medicine amongst currently active non-orthodox practitioners in the UK. 2. To identify the level of support for individual BMA proposals. 3. To identify similarities and ...

Autonomous distributed control (ADC) is one of the most attractive approaches for more versatile and autonomous robot systems. The paper proposes a parallel and distributed trajectory generation method for redundant manipulators through cooperative and competitive interactions among subsystems composing the ADC that is based on a concept of virtual arms. ...

From the earliest times, medical practitioners have sought divine help and support to aid them as they go about their busy rounds. In the early Christian era, 4 individuals were singled out as patron saints of medicine, and particularly of physicians and surgeons. These men were all natives of Asia ...

In order to evaluate the prevalence of definite cases of Menière's disease (MD), we performed a 1-year survey in 1994 of patients in the Hida and Nishikubiki districts, where a majority of the patients are thought to seek treatment at the medical facilities within these areas for geographical reasons. As ...

The successful recruitment of medical staff to country areas is a difficult process. This paper outlines strategies designed to increase the probability of a successful recruitment program. Strategies include determining if the position is truly required, designing an advertising campaign that reaches the target audience and addressing the significant regional ...

Travelling to tropical and subtropical destinations is common among European citizens. Many of them consult their general practitioners (GPs) for pre-travel advice. Little is known about the knowledge, the sources of information and the needs of physicians. One hundred and fifty Swiss and I50 German GPs giving travel advice were ...

AIM: To assess the knowledge of Waikato medical practitioners concerning cardiac pacing and its indications. METHOD: Anonymous postal questionnaire. The responses received were compared with those of four New Zealand experts on cardiac pacing. RESULTS: 404 questionnaires were administered of which 204 (50%) were returned, (16.3% physicians, 22.7% JRMO's 61% ...

OBJECTIVE: To examine factors that influence medical practitioners' treatment decisions for patients with life-threatening or terminal illnesses. DESIGN: Postal survey, conducted between September and November 1995, of a self-administered questionnaire, describing four clinical case scenarios, to a random sample of 2172 Australian doctors in all States and Territories. Respondents were ...

Recent studies have shown that adequate medication can prevent the recurrence of febrile seizures (FS). It has also been clarified that the vast majority of, though not all, FS patients follow a benign course. Then, questions arise as to whether or not FS should be prevented, particularly in light of ...

At 2.00 am on the morning of May 24, 1995 the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly Australia passed the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act by the narrow margin of 15 votes to 10. The act permits a terminally ill patient of sound mind and over the age of 18 years, ...