Although there is an extensive literature on the placebo effect in psychotherapy, the distinction between the placebo and other elements of the therapeutic process has not been clear. This paper analyzes the therapeutic relationship in terms of separating the placebo elements and the specific actors. The so-called nonspecific elements, often equated with the placebo, are proposed as the specifi...

My book, The Darwinian Revolution gives an overview of the revolution as understood at the time of its writing (1979). It shows that many factors were involved, from straight science through philosophical methodology, and on to religious influences and challenges. Also of importance were social factors, not the least of which was the professionalization of science in Britain in the 19th century...

A prospective study was performed to better define the role of computers in teaching radiology to medical students. Two hundred twenty-five 3rd-year students were randomly assigned to one of four groups and exposed to 10 radiology cases as well as to a voluntary weekly radiology lecture. Group A used computer-based cases with interactive elements; group B used computer-based cases without inter...

a member of the Chirurgical Club. This Society of twenty-five surgeons, representative of all the extrametropolitan teaching schools of Great Britain, has now visited the majority of the great centres of surgical activity in Europe, and its members have been able to 1 Being part of a Presidential Address to the Bath and Bristol Branch of the British Medical Association, delivered on June 22nd, ...

This study investigated the integration of word- and phrase-level prominences in speech produced by twenty-five school-aged children (6;2 to 7;3) and twenty-five adults. Participants produced disyllabic number words in a straight count condition and in two phrasal conditions, namely, a stress clash and non-clash phrasal context. Duration and amplitude measures of syllable rhymes were used to as...

Late adolescence and the period following, often referred to as emerging adulthood, have been noted as particularly important for setting the stage for continued development through the life span as individuals begin to make choices and engage in a variety of activities that are influential for the rest of their lives. Demographic, sociocultural, and labor market changes have made the years bet...

Two papers in the Journal this month report on results from the Christchurch Psychotherapy of Depression Study, a randomised controlled trial of interpersonal psychotherapy and cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) involving an out-patient sample. Luty et al (pp. 496–502) found no significant difference in efficacy between the two treatment groups, with overall improvements in depressive symptoma...

BACKGROUND Valid estimates of health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) are often difficult to obtain from persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and family caregiver proxies. To help assess whether the general public can serve as an alternate source of proxy HRQoL estimates in AD, we examined whether the general public can use vignettes to discriminate between AD health states. METHODS We admini...

BACKGROUND Generic preference-based health-related quality of life instruments are widely used to measure health benefit within economic evaluation. The availability of multiple instruments raises questions about their relative merits and recent studies have highlighted the paucity of evidence regarding measurement properties in the context of spinal cord injury (SCI). This qualitative study ex...

AIMS To investigate the feasibility of discrete choice experiments for valuing EQ-5D-5L states using computer-based data collection, the consistency of the estimated regression coefficients produced after modeling the preference data, and to examine the similarity of the values derived across countries. METHODS Data were collected in Canada, England, The Netherlands, and the United States (US...