OBJECTIVES Reassurance is an essential part of treatment for low back pain (LBP), but evidence on effective methods to deliver reassurance remains scarce. The interaction between consultation-based reassurance and patients' psychological risk is unknown. Our objective was to investigate the relationship between consultation-based reassurance and clinical outcomes at follow-up, in people with an...

BACKGROUND Empathy as a characteristic of patient-physician communication in both general practice and clinical care is considered to be the backbone of the patient-physician relationship. Although the value of empathy is seldom debated, its effectiveness is little discussed in general practice. This literature review explores the effectiveness of empathy in general practice. Effects that are ...

Over the last years, more and more sensor systems emerged that can not only be accessed but also controlled and configured using the Internet. This trend allows mobile applications that rely on sensor data; however, the access and configuration of sensor systems is a tedious task. As many sensor manufacturers implement their own protocols, there are many communication protocols. Although unifyi...

Taiwan is located at the collision boundary of the Philippine sea plate and the Eurasian plate. The mountain terrain is precipitous and the region, on the whole, is characterized by fragile rocks and frequent seismic activity. In addition, the concentrated torrential rainfall brought by typhoons cause extensive disasters, debris flow, the most serious disaster caused by torrential rainfall, lea...

This paper provides an insight to the drivers, design elements and issues associated with spatially enabling the management of coastal zones, in particular coastal property rights, restrictions and responsibilities. Coastal zones are encumbered by hundreds of property rights, restrictions, and responsibilities. These are created to manage coastal population increases, climate change, and to del...

BACKGROUND Many patients with chronic illness receive health care in primary care settings, so a challenge is to provide well-structured chronic care in these settings. Our aim was to develop and test a Dutch version of the PACIC questionnaire, a measure for patient reported structured chronic care. METHODS Observational study in 165 patients with diabetes or COPD from four general practices ...

Dopamine (DA) plays an essential role in the enablement of cognition. It adds color to experience-dependent information storage, conferring salience to the memories that result. At the synaptic level, experience-dependent information storage is enabled by synaptic plasticity, and given its importance for memory formation, it is not surprising that DA comprises a key neuromodulator in the enable...

The 2010 Symposium on VLSI Technology will be held at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu, Hawaii, June 14-17, 2010. The Technology meeting begins with a short course for the VLSI Technology on June 14 entitled “Emerging Logic and Memory Technologies for VLSI Implementation”. There will be 22 technology sessions in the conference including a plenary session on the opening day of the Symposi...

Our system is designed to cope with water depths of around 100m, meaning the number of measurements taken during one dive can be significant. Storage is thus required for the large volumes of measurement data: not only those collected by the diving unit but also from light and acceleration sensors placed on the top of the buoy. System data also needs to be saved; for example, the energy produce...

In a SOA context, enterprises can use workflow technologies to orchestrate available business processes and their corresponding services and apply business rules or policies to control how they can be used and who can use them. This approach becomes a bit more complex when a set of business processes includes services that derive outside the company's domain and therefore can be difficult to al...