BACKGROUND Maintenance dialysis is a relatively low prevalence, highly specialized, and labour-intensive treatment, which is usually delivered at regional centres serving many different health authorities. It is unknown whether a patient's health authority, in many ways an accident of birth, influences long-term dialysis outcomes. AIM To study survival patterns in patients starting maintenanc...

a 1993 executive order, similar to two Reagan orders that it replaced, requiring most proposed regulations to undergo economic and risk analyses. In 1996, the Office of Management and Budget issued more detailed guidelines on how to conduct those analyses, consistent with the Clinton order. Those measures would have provided an adequate basis for review of agency-proposed rules if the administr...

May-June 2012 To the Editor: In the SeptemberOctober 2011 issue, Daniel Groll addresses the question of what health care providers can know about patients’ interests (“What Health Care Providers Know”). He offers helpful refinements to my claim in Patient, Heal Thyself (Oxford, 2008) that generally health providers cannot know what serves patient interests. I am honored that a careful student o...

The authority of a leader is enhanced when her commands or recommendations for action are obeyed. The authority of a leader is also enhanced when her commands are "principled" based on good reasons and therefore the leader is seen to be acting in the interests of her followers. But for a leader interested in maintaining her authority, there is often a con ict between these strategies. For examp...

Mitochondrial Cytochrome Oxidase Subunit I DNA sequences are a good discriminative marker for phylogenetic studies in crustaceans and especially in amphipoda. In the present study, molecular and morphological data were analyzed to test whether Gammarus lobifer authority and Gammarus balutchi authority which one or two geographically separated but morphologically similar species. The analyses pr...