BACKGROUND In the United States, lawsuits against physicians have had an impact on their behaviour, resulting in overdiagnosis and other forms of 'defensive medicine'. Does a similar situation exist in Switzerland? Using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening as an example, we surveyed Swiss physicians and assessed the extent to which liability fears influenced their recommendation for testi...

AIM Virtual patients (VPs) are a one-of-a-kind e-learning resource, fostering clinical reasoning skills through clinical case examples. The combination with face-to-face teaching is important for their successful integration, which is referred to as "blended learning". So far little is known about the use of VPs in the field of continuing medical education and residency training. The pilot stud...

Men have been using herbal medicines for thousands of years. The advantages of this type of therapeutics include good availability, local cultural aspects, individual preferences, the increasing demand for natural and organic products, and the already validated synergistic effects of herbal medicines. However, ethically, the scope and limits of these drugs need to be established not only by eth...

Purpose. To determine family medicine residents' perceived knowledge and attitudes towards the built environment and their responsibility for health advocacy and to identify their perceived educational needs and barriers to patient education and advocacy. Methods. A web-based survey was conducted in Canada with University of Toronto family medicine residents. Data were analyzed descriptively. R...

The United States health system is in crisis. Amidst unprecedented opportunities to transform healthcare for the better, American medicine faces threats from two directions. One is financial and cannot be solved by the profession alone. Health care technologies are more expensive, more people want access to them, and reimbursement mechanisms neither provide universal coverage nor reward improve...

With medical education transitioning from knowledge-based curricula to competency-based curricula, critical thinking skills have emerged as a major competency. While there are validated external instruments for assessing critical thinking, many educators have created their own custom assessments of critical thinking. However, the face validity of these assessments has not been challenged. The p...

his paper proposes that the discipline of General Practice (Family Medicine) appropriately trains doctors to meet the identified health needs of Nepal and can make an extremely valuable contribution to the medical education of undergraduates. The paper will identify the current health needs of Nepal as revealed in The Human Resources Report of His Majesty’s Government (HMG) 2003 and demonstrate...

COURSE IN THE AREA OF HEALTH PROMOTION Mahrokh Kheshvari, Niko Yamani, Peyman Abidi, Hossein Shahnazi. Assistant Professor, Nursing and Midwifery Research Center in nursing and midwifery school in Isfahan University of medical sciences, Isfahan, Iran; Associate Professor, Medical Education Research Center, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran; Professor of Medicine; Isfahan Uni...

BACKGROUND The recent growth of arts and humanities in medical education shows recognition that these disciplines can facilitate a breadth of thinking and result in personal and professional growth. However creative work can be a challenge to incorporate into a busy curriculum. Offering the option of creative media as a way of reflecting is an example of how this can occur. This study aimed to ...