Recent figures show that there has been no change in the upward trend of direct and indirect costs for the largely benign symptom of low back pain in Western societies. This is despite greater understanding and the recommendation of a much more conservative and independent approach to its management. Moreover, in recent years, several large-scale education programs that aim to bring knowledge o...

OBJECTIVES Infliximab has been shown to be effective in the treatment of ankylosing spondylitis (AS) when treated in a dose of 5 mg/kg at 6 weekly intervals. This dose of infliximab has not been determined by any structured randomized trials and has significant cost implications. We describe our experience of treating AS with low-dose infliximab (3mg/kg at 8 weekly intervals). The efficacy and ...

recently, most of firms are encouraging to employ informal labour force for reduction of their costs, in order to improve their competitiveness in global markets. these sorts of employees due to decrease labour expenses, thus help to the firm competitiveness, but little training and skill of them decreases competitiveness of firm in global markets. this article studies the effect of flexibility...

Insomnia affects a significant proportion of the general population and an even greater proportion of patients seen in general medical care. Insomnia has multiple negative effects on health status, decreases quality of life, and is associated with increased health care costs. Current treatments for insomnia include pharmacologic and behavioral strategies. Pharmacologic treatments may be effecti...

Despite widespread agreement that physicians who practice defensive medicine drive up health care costs, the extent to which defensive medicine increases costs is unclear. The differences in findings to date stem in part from the use of two distinct approaches for assessing physicians' perceived malpractice risk. In this study we used an alternative strategy: We linked physicians' responses reg...

Health insurance plans with high deductibles increase exposure to health care costs, raising concerns about how the growth in these plans may be impacting both the financial burden of health care expenditures on families and their access to health care. We find that foregoing medical care is common among low-income, privately insured families, occurring at a greater rate than those with higher ...