Rheumatology and rheumatology research, a mismatch.
نویسنده
چکیده
THE study by Williams and his colleagues [1] raises the questions: What is the rheumatologist's job description? How should he dispense his time between seeing patients and training his staff and in what directions should he lead his researchers? There could be as many answers as there are rheumatologists. One feature of life as a consultant in Britain is freedom to play the consultant game constructively in many ways. The absence of a rigid job description allows him to do what he is best at. How he spends his time depends largely on what his colleagues consult him about. This in turn depends on how they perceive his fields of interest as judged by his publications and background. His hobby horses, in fact. But the National Health Service is not just a hippodrome for hobby horses. There has to be some frame of reference in the overall provision of rheumatological expertise and facilities which will still allow scope for variation within the whole. The dimensions of the frame are the prevalence of the different forms of rheumatic suffering (as judged by complaint rates and days of sickness absence) and the rheumatologist's confidence in doing something about that suffering, a confidence (and competence) which is born of his previous training and research. In the past the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council for Research found itself in a somewhat hypocritical postition in that, when soliciting support from the public and citing the numbers of rheumatism sufferers, it counted back pain and soft tissue rheumatism as part of the enormous national burden of rheumatic disease. At the same time it had supported few projects in those fields, according to its annual reports. No blame could attach to the Council since it could only reflect the subjects which applicants put forward for funding. To redress the balance as far as back pain was concerned, the Back Pain Research Society (BPRS) was set up in 1970, to promote research in this field and to counter the feeling that 'respectable' rheumatologists didn't like to get identified with a subject which had been invaded by the host of heterodox healers.
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عنوان ژورنال:
- British journal of rheumatology
دوره 31 3 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1992