The measurement of blood pressure in the physician's office is subject to a number of observer errors and also to the "white-coat effect." Automatic devices that measure blood pressure without a human observer in the room can eliminate many of these problems. We argue for greater use of these devices in the physician's office.

The trainee in difficulty is someone who is either marginal or at risk of failing in his or her clinical performance. Dealing effectively with these learners can pose problems even for seasoned medical educators. This article discusses some of the common mistakes made by educators in dealing with the trainee in difficulty and offers suggestions for a systematic approach. Further, the roles of f...

The purpose of our research is the development of a new technology, teleimmersion, which will make possible 3D visual communication between people distributed over the globe. We are putting together a low-end, PC-based, affordable hardware system, and are developing the software for a teleimmersion node (T-node). The software is based on accurate polynocular stereo. We will describe a testbed f...

PURPOSE To assess the impact of 2005 and 2006 reductions in chemotherapy reimbursement, mandated in the Medicare Modernization Act, on patterns of chemotherapy receipt in the last 14 days of life. PATIENTS AND METHODS Included in the study were Medicare beneficiaries dying with poor-prognosis cancer from 2003 to 2007. We compared pre- and postreform probability and frequency of chemotherapy r...

results amongst 938 stool samples, 36 were shigella spp. s. sonnei (61.1%, n = 22), which was the most common, followed by s. flexneri (27.8%, n = 10), s. boydii (8.3%, n = 3), and s. dysenteriae (2.8%, n = 1). furthermore, most shigella isolates showed resistance to amoxicillin (83.3%), tetracycline (61.1%), and co-trimoxazole (83.3%). no resistance was found against ciprofloxacin and imipenem...

In an interesting article Wieteke van Dijk and colleagues argue that societal developments and values influence the practice of medicine, and thus can result in both medicalisation and overdiagnosis. They provide a convincing argument that overdiagnosis emerges in a social context and that it has socially constructed implications. However, they fail to show that overdiagnosis per se is socially...