According to a well-known adage of folk psychology, “where there is smoke, there is fire.” In his two-part contribution to this symposium on “the sense of being stared at,” Rupert Sheldrake examines some of the smoke (fictional allusions, anecdotal observations and reports, and the persisting lore) surrounding this alleged phenomenon and attempts to determine whether such smoke might indeed be ...

Psychophysical methods, data and theory have interesting clinical applications in the field of medicine. Physicians have special needs for new methods that reveal a patient’s self-report of current health status. Subjects often are asked to express judgments about variables such as pain intensity, respiratory discomfort during exercise, and quality of life. Examples described in this paper are ...

BACKGROUND Scotland's overall health record is comparatively poor for a Western European country, particularly amongst people of working age. A number of previous studies have explored why this might be the case by comparing mortality in Scotland with England and Wales. A study in the 1980s showed that the higher prevalence of deprivation in Scotland accounted for Scotland's excess mortality ri...

BACKGROUND Several instruments are available to assess children's health-related quality of life (HRQoL) based on self reports as well as proxy reports from parents. Previous studies have found only low-to-moderate agreement between self and proxy reports, but few studies have explicitly compared the psychometric qualities of both. This study compares the reliability, factorial validity and con...

In order to document perceptions of text comments appearing in surgical pathology reports, questionnaires were distributed to 4 groups of caregivers: university staff pathologists, resident pathologists, faculty clinicians (other than pathologists), and resident clinicians at a teaching hospital. Results of this pilot study showed a wide degree of variability existed within each group of surgic...

In order to document perceptions of text comments appearing in surgical pathology reports, questionnaires were distributed to 4 groups of caregivers: university staff pathologists, resident pathologists, faculty clinicians (other than pathologists), and resident clinicians at a teaching hospital. Results of this pilot study showed a wide degree of variability existed within each group of surgic...

NOTE: This is a first draft of the RMSPG report. It needs substantial polishing, is definitely too long and still, in places, incomplete. However, we post it in this preliminary state in order to invite community input at a stage when input can still help us shape the final report. We trust that the unevenness and imperfection will be recognized for its preliminary nature (“warts and all”). We ...

55 patients, who admitted during three month to ccu ward of one academic hospital, participated in this study. 80% of these patients had delay to report of their chest pain and 4% of them had complete failure to report it. reasons for didn’t report of pain and its signs were unawareness of nurse and physician about problem that is occurring and unawareness of patient about need to saying this p...