A recent article published in Bloomberg Businessweek1 has painted a grim picture of family planning practices in India by coercing women into sterilization. In the village of Sonhoula, 33 women, many of them poor, were forced into sterilization because each woman received either $10 or a modest increase in welfare benefits from local officials. These women accepted the offer out of desperation ...

We exploit a natural experiment associated with a large merger in the Swedish market for analgesics (painkillers). We confront the predictions from a merger simulation study, as conducted during the investigation, with the actual merger e¤ects over a two-year comparison window. The merger simulation model is based on a constant expenditures speci…cation for the aggregate nested logit model (as ...

The paradoxical goal of much of animal-based biomedical research is to model severe human injuries and illnesses without causing severe pain or distress to the animals. Current public policy in most countries calls for treatment or prevention of laboratory animal pain whenever possible. However, the ‘‘whenever possible’’ provision allows for some intentional infliction of untreated pain in labo...

background: promotion of health is the fundamental strategy for controlling risk factors of unhealthy lifestyle and consequently improving health of individuals and society. Health professions play a leading role in this process. Aim: the purpose of our empirical study was to gain an insight of the role of health professions in health and wellbeing of elite athletes. The research was based on t...

Thirty-three terminal cancer patients suffering from extremely severe drug-resistant pain were treated with Scrambler Therapy, a new bioengineering-based method for treating oncological/ neuropathic pain. Preliminary tests of the method’s effectiveness were performed by measuring pain intensity (visual analogue scale (VAS)) before and after each treatment session, and the duration of absence of...

STUDY DESIGN  Prospective case series. OBJECTIVE  To evaluate the effect of three repetitive transforaminal steroid injections in a large series of selected patients with cervical radiculopathy caused by spondylosis. METHODS  Consecutively, 140 patients with long-lasting medical history, clinical findings, and MRI indicating a cervical nerve root origin based on degenerative disease and a p...

UNLABELLED We compared the effects of i.v. tramadol (1.25 mg/kg), codeine (1 mg/kg), morphine (0.125 mg/kg), and saline on gastric emptying in 10 healthy human volunteers using a double-blind, randomized, cross-over design. Subjects received one treatment at each of four sessions, 2 wk apart. Gastric emptying was studied using the paracetamol absorption test. There were significant differences ...

BACKGROUND Our objective was to analyze and determine several risk factors of falls in the rural elderly population. Our study examined several variables believed to be positively correlated with the likelihood of an elderly person sustaining a fall. METHODS Analysis was performed on a prospective study of 308 community-dwelling rural elders during a span of 6 years. Factors such as prescript...

Recent research has shown the possibility of pain perception in fish; therefore, the use of analgesia or “painkillers” should be considered for invasive procedures. However, there is relatively little information on the effectiveness of analgesic drugs nor on the appropriate dose for fish. This study assessed the efficacy of three types of drug: an opioid, buprenorphine, a non-steroidal anti-in...

__________________________________________________________________________ Background: The effect of intra-articular treatment of hip osteoarthritis with hyaluronic acid in the hip joint is not based on large randomized controlled trials. Hyaluronic acid is a well established treatment for osteoarthritis of the knee. Methods: Randomized controlled trial with three-armed parallel-group design. T...