Appropriate patient instructions can reduce prostate motion

Appropriate patient instructions can reduce prostate motion

BACKGROUND Interfraction prostate motion must be compensated by increased safety margins. If filling status of rectum and bladder is constant, motion should be reduced. We attempted to reduce interfraction motion errors by proper patient instruction. METHOD In 38 patients pairs of radio-opaque fiducial markers were implanted prior to definitive radiotherapy. Patients were positioned either ac...

Can chemoprevention reduce the risk of prostate cancer?

A few years ago, I attended the annual meeting of the Clinical Ligand Assay Society. From the airport, I took a taxi to my hotel. The taxi driver, a 60-year-old man, was curious and asked why I was visiting Philadelphia. I told him that I was attending a medical conference and giving a lecture on prostate cancer. He immediately got very excited! He showed me a 2-L Coca Cola bottle, which was ha...

How to point and to interpret pointing gestures? Instructions can reduce pointer-observer misunderstandings.

In everyday communication, people often point. However, a pointing act is often misinterpreted as indicating a different spatial referent position than intended by the pointer. It has been suggested that this happens because pointers put the tip of the index finger close to the line joining the eye to the referent. However, the person interpreting the pointing act extrapolates the vector define...

Can 40 seconds of compassion reduce patient anxiety?

PURPOSE To use a standardized videotape stimulus to assess the effect of physician compassion on viewers' anxiety, information recall, treatment decisions, and assessment of physician characteristics. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS One hundred twenty-three healthy female breast cancer survivors and 87 women without cancer were recruited for this study. A randomized pretest/posttest control group de...

Pharmacist-led medication reviews can reduce patient morbidity?