Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) the world-famous philosopher, theologian, concert organist, musicologist, philanthropist and winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize suffered throughout most of his life from severe and painful muscle cramps in his right upper extremity which were triggered exclusively by handwriting. They led to tonic finger flexion and wrist ...

Prescribing of medicines is the key clinical activity in the working life of most doctors. In recent years, a broad consensus regarding the necessary competencies has been achieved. Each of these is a complex mix of knowledge, judgement and skills. Surveys of those on the threshold of their medical careers ...

PURPOSE: To investigate the longer-term career outcomes, such as specialty choice and practice location, of underrepresented minority and disadvantaged students who finished a University of California postbaccalaureate (UCPB) premedical program. METHOD: The authors compared 303 UCPB alumni from 1986 to 2002 who matriculated into medical school and could be matched ...

Stories abound about the medical abuses that have come to define medicine and the "pseudo"-neurosciences in the Third Reich. Well known are the Nazi program of euthanasia and the neuroscientific publications that arose from it. Nevertheless, during this widespread perversion of medical practice and science, true medical heroics persisted, even ...

Physicians treating patients for chronic pain have limited means of determining whether a person is taking their medications as prescribed and are not taking extra medication. Complicating patient treatment regimens is the fact that pain physicians' prescribing practices may come under scrutiny by the Drug Enforcement Agency and other licensing ...

Abstract Objectives. To examine prehospital emergency medical services (EMS) scope of practice for acute cardiovascular events and characteristics that may affect scope of practice; and to describe variations in EMS scope of practice for these events and the characteristics associated with that variability. Methods. In 2008, we conducted a telephone ...

During the initial assessment of the injured athlete, the Sports Physical Therapist (PT) must first be concerned with life-threatening emergencies such as absence of breathing and pulse. The sports PT must also be aware of the possibility of "sudden cardiac death" that could occur in others, including coaches, officials, and ...

Medical practice divorce is endemic and as personally harmful as marital divorce Using lessons from crisis interventions in medical practices, the author suggests a few essential prescriptions for ensuring high morale among physicians as well as reducing practice divorce. A key ingredient among collegial, healthy medical practices is insight into ...

E-mail has at one and the same time become a primary communication tool for many medical practice employees and a source of untold frustration, misunderstandings, and stress. This article provides a total of 50 rules (25 do's and 25 don'ts) for e-mail netiquette to help medical practice employees use e-mail ...

The number of medical students trained in Nepal each year has increased nearly fifty-fold in the last 15 years, primarily through the creation of private medical schools. It is unknown where this expanding cohort of new physicians will ultimately practice. We distributed an anonymous survey to students in their last ...

The physician-patient encounter may be structured, but it is never scripted; every physician-patient interaction is to some degree improvised. Both physicians and improvisers must prepare for unpredictability, and the surprising and unrecognized overlap between improvisational theater and medical training and medical practice led the author to develop a seminar that ...

AFOMP recognizes that clinical medical physicists should demonstrate that they are competent to practice their profession by obtaining appropriate education, training and supervised experience in the specialties of medical physics in which they practice, as well as having a basic knowledge of other specialties. To help its member countries to ...

To foster work-ready general physicians, Jichi Medical University has developed various clinical teaching practices since its foundation. The educational courses for clinical laboratory medicine, being one of them, adopt practical trainings in ultrasonography, which is essential in practical medicine today. The aims and the specifics of the trainings adopted in ...

Coercion in psychiatric practice appears to be increasing. Is this in patients' best interest? Is it good medical practice?

What is already known on this topic A large proportion of medical graduates do not feel prepared for practice. Prescribing is one of the biggest steps up from being a student to practising as a doctor. What this study adds Graduates lack of preparedness for practice is related to a ...

Motor subtypes have promise as a means of identifying clinically relevant delirium subgroups. Little is known about their relationship to etiologies, medication exposure, and outcomes. Consecutive cases of DSM-IV delirium in palliative care patients were assessed twice-weekly throughout their delirium episodes using the Delirium Motor Subtype Scale (DMSS), Delirium Etiology ...

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to investigate whether experienced physicians' electrodiagnostic practice and criteria can be influenced by international collaboration involving peer review medical audit. METHODS: Data was obtained from the ESTEEM project, an ongoing collaboration since 1991 among European neurophysiologists concerned with quality improvement in electrodiagnostic medicine. ...

Reasons for performing study: Medications are frequently employed to treat intra-articular (IA) problems in the performance horse. Actual usage of the different IA medications in horses is not available. Objectives: To determine the most common usage of these medications, members of the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) were surveyed. ...

Prescribing errors account for a significant proportion of overall error in general practice. Repeat prescribing occurs commonly in New Zealand and is a likely cause of error in practice. This paper reports on two related aspects of repeat prescribing; an audit of adherence to a repeat prescribing protocol and self-reported ...

BACKGROUND: No studies have evaluated the consultation process or attempted to define a standardized approach that could improve communication and patient outcomes. OBJECTIVE: To perform a qualitative analysis of emergency medicine (EM) consultation to reveal its complexity and elucidate strategies and frameworks for physician-to-physician communication. METHODS: Data were collected in ...

As part of their compliance planning, medical practices should undergo a risk assessment to determine any vulnerability within the practice relative to security breaches. Practices should also implement safeguards to limit their risks. Such safeguards include facility access controls, information and electronic media management, use of business associate agreements, and ...

Most medical practice employees agree pretty readily that they want to achieve a high level of excellence both in their work and in their lives. But defining and achieving excellence can be a challenge. This article explores specifically what it means to be excellent both inside and outside the medical ...

Background: Medical students and doctors experience several types of professional distress. Their causes ("stressors") are commonly classified as exogenous (adapting to medical school or clinical practice) and endogenous (due to personality traits). Attempts to reduce distress have consisted of providing students with support and counseling, and improving doctors' management of ...

Personal skills are now recognised to be important components of effective medical practice. These skills are explicit in the CANMED competencies from Canada, the recommendations of the ACGME from the United States and the recently revised 'Tomorrow's Doctors' paper from the Medical Council in the United Kingdom. The recommended core ...

Advances in science and technology have revolutionized medical services in the last two decades. Medical education in the undergraduate and postgraduate courses has tried to keep pace with the changes and several curriculum modifications have taken effect. One of the commonly seen changes include active participation in "communication skills" training ...

Background: Future physicians should be educated in evidence-based medicine. So it is of growing importance for medical students to acquire both practical medical and basic research competencies. However, possibilities and concepts focusing on the acquisition of basic practical research competencies during undergraduate medical studies in Germany are rare. Therefore the ...

Introduction: Encouraged by the change in licensing regulations the practical professional skills in Germany received a higher priority and are taught in medical schools therefore increasingly. This created the need to standardize the process more and more. On the initiative of the German skills labs the German Medical Association Committee ...

Before the advent of digital visualization, the "anatomical transparency"--layered images of organ systems, printed on a transparent medium--flourished in the mid-twentieth century as an interactive means to represent complex anatomical relationships to medical professionals and lay audiences. This article introduces the transparency work of medical illustrators Gladys McHugh and Ernest ...

Prosthetic-Valve Dehiscence Images in Clinical Medicine, N Engl J Med 2010;362:e20. In the second sentence (page e20), the parenthetical information should have read “Bjork–Shiley and ATS Medical, respectively,” rather than “Medtronic Hall and ATS Medical, respectively.” The article has been corrected at NEJM.org.

"President John F. Kennedy's death was a neurotoxin-assisted homicide" is the hypothesis of this study. A review of medical evidence demonstrates evidence of a neurotoxin-assisted homicide. The convergence of three independent actions, or the signature traits of a neurotoxin-assisted homicide- the emergence of neurological signs consistent with a neurotoxin-induced paralysis, ...

A novel content-based information retrieval framework, designed to cover several medical applications, is presented in this paper. The presented framework allows the retrieval of possibly incomplete medical cases consisting of several images together with semantic information. It relies on a committee of decision trees, decision support tools well suited to ...

Hypothyroidism presenting as ascites is one of the rarest clinical scenarios encountered in medical practice. A case of a 65-year-old woman, presenting with progressive onset ascites, secondary to underlying hypothyroidism, which responded to thyroid hormone replacement therapy is reported. A feature of hypothyroidism Induced ascites is the high protein content ...

To medically and psychologically assess gay men seeking parenthood through assisted reproduction and to provide guidelines for the assessment. Qualitative observational study. Academic medical center. Thirty gay males (15 couples) presenting for assisted reproduction using an oocyte donor and a gestational carrier. Semistructured interview and medical evaluation. Determination of psychological ...

OBJECTIVE: To explore the events and people that shaped Harvey Cushing, one of the nation's leading surgeons, into a political actor as he rallied support for the issue of military medical preparedness for World War One. SUMMARY BACKGROUND DATA: In a little remembered episode of American medical history, for 2 ...

The paper discusses the major Argentineans contributors, medical physicists and scientists, in medical imaging and the development of medical imaging in Argentina. The following are presented: history of medical imaging in Argentina: the pioneers; medical imaging and medical revolution; nuclear medicine imaging; ultrasound imaging; and mathematics, physics, and electronics in ...

Both private organizations and the United States government are responding to recent concerns about the exposure of patients to ionizing radiation as the result of medical imaging. Some of the recent actions taken are described in this article.

PURPOSE: Generation of graspable three-dimensional objects applied for surgical planning, prosthetics and related applications using 3D printing or rapid prototyping is summarized and evaluated. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Graspable 3D objects overcome the limitations of 3D visualizations which can only be displayed on flat screens. 3D objects can be produced based ...

For centuries pictures of the dead and wounded have been part and parcel of war communications. Often the intentions were clear, ranging from medical instructions to anti-war protests. The public's response could coincide with or diverge from the publisher's intention. Following the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, and ...

OBJECTIVES: During the last few years, wireless networks have been increasingly used both inside hospitals and in patients' homes to transmit medical information. In general, wireless networks suffer from decreased security. However, digital watermarking can be used to secure medical information. In this study, we focused on combining wireless transmission ...

Written as a response to a conference exhibition of medical illustrations of reproduction, this article considers the gains of an interdisciplinary study of medical illustration to both historians and medics. The article insists that we should not only be attuned to the cultural work that such representations perform but also ...

This paper targets both current apprentices and their supervisors drawing on current research to answer the following questions. What is apprenticeship and what are the key elements? What is a good apprentice and what can an intern or registrar do to assist their own learning and development? It takes a ...

The Institute of Medicine has determined that adverse drug events (ADEs) are the number one cause of medical errors in the United States and that additional efforts are required to improve patient safety. Medical imaging plays an important role in ADEs, most commonly related to the administration of imaging contrast ...

Although assisted dying has been most commonly presented within a medicalised framework, the notion of de-medicalisation is employed in this paper to suggest that there are emerging models of assisted dying in which some medical aspects assumed to be an integral part of the phenomenon are both challenged and diminished. ...

When one examines Alexandrian commentaries on works of Galen and Hippocrates, disclosed are essential guides to the Art of Medicine as practiced in the late fifth, sixth, and early seventh centuries. These are outlines and contents of a 'medical curriculum' in late Byzantine Alexandria, as well as Ravenna, and thanks ...

Dementia is a progressive and incurable condition that in one way or another affects nearly everyone. Examples of specific types of dementia include Alzheimer disease, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies. Age is the primary risk factor for dementia and the long-term social and economic effects of ...

Chylous discharge or "chylorrhea" from the scrotum secondary to filariasis is an infrequent manifestation. With the availability of effective medical therapy for filariasis, it has become even more unusual. We report on 2 patients who presented to us with a persistent milky white discharge from the vesicles on the scrotal ...

Ultrasound has been the greatest imaging modality worldwide for many years by equipment purchase value and by number of machines and examinations. It is becoming increasingly the front end imaging modality; serving often as an extension of the physician's fingers. We believe that at the other extreme, high-end systems will ...

In today's medicine ultrasound and imaging are dominant features. As a consequence a tactile maneuver like palpation of the pulse became something like a relic from the past, rather trivial and habitual but certainly not an activity to be haughty about in terms of skill and professional development. Nevertheless medical ...

Currently in the United States, pregnant women may obtain both medical fetal ultrasonography for screening and commercial fetal ultrasonography for entertainment purposes. The proliferation of commercial fetal ultrasonography suggests that medical screening alone does not satisfy patient expectations regarding fetal imaging. We investigated the prevalence of nonmedical fetal imaging and ...

Medical imaging is a prime example of an innovation that has brought important advances to medical care while triggering concerns about potential overuse and excessive costs. Many hopes are riding on comparative effectiveness research to help guide better decision making to improve quality and value. But the dynamic nature of ...