he past few years in health care have been a story of extraordinary turbulence. After decades of uncontrolled cost escalation, the businesses and governments that directly pay for most health care finally mandated a fiscal restraint that, in the early 1990s, launched in earnest the upheaval known as “managed care.” One major result has been the replacement of such values as, “If it might help a...

The Islamic moral code originates from two primary sources: the Quran and the Sunnah (Rady and Verheijde 2014a). Regardless of time and place, this code provides practical and comprehensive guidance on behavioral aspects in health and illness. In Western principlism-based bioethics, medical futility justifies withholding and withdrawing of life-sustaining treatment (LST) based on a subjective d...

Many biomarkers identified in marker discovery are shown to have inadequate performance in validation studies. This motivates the use of group sequential designs that allow early termination for futility. However, an option for early termination will lead to biased estimates for studies that reach full enrollment. We propose conditional estimators and confidence intervals that correct for this ...

The function GrpSeqBnds computes efficacy and futility boundaries given the stipulation of the information fraction, total type I and type II error probabilities and method of boundary construction. The efficacy and futility boundaries can be constructed either simulataneously or one at a time. The function also allows for two information scales. The following sequence of variance fractions res...

conclusions patients’ experiences of stigma and rejection phenomena indicated that all aspects of their lives are affected. moreover, these findings highlight the significance of stigma and rejection concepts in providing better care to these patients. results after analysis of interviews, four themes were extracted: lack of social support, unrealistic and inappropriate labeling, rejection and ...