Health care providers occasionally may find that providing indicated, even standard, care would present for them a personal moral problem—a conflict of conscience—particularly in the field of reproductive medicine. Although respect for conscience is important, conscientious refusals should be limited if they constitute an imposition of religious or moral beliefs on patients, negatively affect a...

Study sample No method of subject selection was stated other than that those included were registered asthmatics at the authors' practice, and that they were first prescribed FP in 1993 (FP group) or 1994 (control group). No power calculations were stated in the determination of the study sample size. Group sizes were: 21 (FP first prescribed in 1993) and 24 (FP first prescribed in 1994). The s...

We present preliminary work on the benefits of argumentation-based negotiation, for a simple framework for one-to-one negotiation between agents in a resource reallocation setting. Agents engage in dialogues with other agents in order to obtain resources they need but do not have. Dialogues are regulated by simple communication policies that allow agents to provide reasons (arguments) for their...

FCA-based classifiers can deal with nonbinary data representation in different ways: use it directly or binarize it. Those algorithms that binarize data use metric information from the initial feature space only as a result of scaling (feature binarization procedure). Metric approach in this area allows one significantly reducing classification refusals number and provides additional informatio...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Parental concerns may contribute to immunization refusals and low infant immunization rates. Little knowledge is available about how often and why parents refuse immunizations for their children. This study was conducted to estimate, based on reports from health care providers and parents, the frequency of and reasons for immunization refusal. METHODS In 1998, we con...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The purpose of the study was to investigate the possible association between cigarette smoking and benign proliferative epithelial disorders of the breast. DESIGN This was a case-control study with two different control groups. SETTING The study was community based and took place in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia. SUBJECTS 506 biopsy proven cases between 18 and 75 ...