although there is evidence that vitamin d deficiency leads to the development of several cancers, including colorectal cancer, research has shown gaps in establishing a relationship between hypovitaminosis d and the incidence of colorectal cancer. there are controversial reports and inadequate scientific evidence about the role of age and race-specific dosage of vitamin d supplementation for ch...

Few phenomena in medicine are more confounding than the diagnoses involving deception: malingering, Munchausen syndrome, Munchausen by proxy (MBP), and factitious disorder (Table 1). Physicians rely on patient reports of symptoms as a starting point for evaluation and treatment planning. They expect to be able to trust their patients' reports. When they are misled, deliberately or inadvertently...

The dynamic and rapidly changing health care environment has led to the convergence of business and medicine. As a result, clinicians and administrators can no longer operate separately, particularly when the role of many physicians has shifted from that of caregivers to leaders. To that end, the University of Cincinnati has provided the educational and developmental opportunity for physicians ...

Objectives. One-third of practices signingout to The Children’s Hospital Call Center in Denver, Colorado, choose to do second-level physician (SLP) triage for calls judged by the Center to require after-hours referral (AHR). We examined: 1) the effect of SLP triage on the rate of AHRs and 2) reasons for physicians’ decisions. Design. From January 1998 to August 1998 all calls from patients usin...

BACKGROUND Poorly functioning, time-consuming, and inadequate information systems are among the most important work-related psychosocial factors causing stress in physicians. The present study examined the trend in the perceived stress that was related to information systems (SRIS) among Finnish physicians during a nine-year follow-up. In addition, we examined the associations of gender, age, e...

BACKGROUND In most health authorities in the UK, general public health physicians provide out-of-hours cover for specialists in communicable disease control. Although communicable disease control was part of their specialist training, there is no current formal mechanism to enable these doctors to keep up to date. The Faculty of Public Health Medicine has an active Continuing Professional Devel...

In an interesting article Wieteke van Dijk and colleagues argue that societal developments and values influence the practice of medicine, and thus can result in both medicalisation and overdiagnosis. They provide a convincing argument that overdiagnosis emerges in a social context and that it has socially constructed implications. However, they fail to show that overdiagnosis per se is socially...

Nearly 2500 years ago, Hippocrates kicked off a revolution in healthcare by calling for the careful collection and recording of evidence about patients and their illnesses. This call—which first introduced the goal of sharing data among physicians to provide the best care possible for patients—established a foundation for the evolution of modern healthcare. Although 25 centuries have passed sin...

Despite increasing recognition of physician burnout, its incidence has only increased in recent years, with nearly half of physicians suffering from symptoms of burnout in the most recent surveys. Unfortunately, most burnout research has focused on its profound prevalence rather than seeking to identify the root cause of the burnout epidemic. Health care organizations throughout the United Stat...