The practice of medicine can never be risk free. Taking risks leads, by definition, to accidents – it is behaviour that carries with it a probability of an adverse outcome. But there are also rewards for risk taking. Reducing risk-taking will reduce both accidents and the rewards: for example, the extremely risk averse regimes governing the development of new drugs increase their costs and dela...

STUDY QUESTION Is a higher use of resources by physicians associated with a reduced risk of malpractice claims? METHODS Using data on nearly all admissions to acute care hospitals in Florida during 2000-09 linked to malpractice history of the attending physician, this study investigated whether physicians in seven specialties with higher average hospital charges in a year were less likely to ...

Food allergic individuals are exposed to unnecessary dietary restrictions due to precautionary food allergy labelling (PFAL). Two forms of PFAL exist: type I identifies the possible presence of allergenic contaminaion in foods ('may content…'), type II indicates as potentially dangerous ingredients or contaminants that do no belong to official list of food allergens. PFAL type II is based on th...

Massive publicity on alleged medical malpractice cases has created hostile environment within the health care setting in Indonesia. The unexpected practice of defensive medicine would be possible response to rise litigation. Although it many negative implications, litigating dispute is preferable for injured patients. Dispute resolution mechanisms should introduced and promoted Indonesia as an ...

BACKGROUND Prospect theory suggests that when faced with an uncertain outcome, people display loss aversion by preferring to risk a greater loss rather than incurring certain, lesser cost. Providing probability information improves decision making towards the economically optimal choice in these situations. Clinicians frequently make decisions when the outcome is uncertain, and loss aversion ma...

This paper compares two methods of prediction with expert advice, the Aggregating Algorithm and the Defensive Forecasting, in two different settings. The first setting is traditional, with a countable number of experts and a finite number of outcomes. Surprisingly, these two methods of fundamentally different origin lead to identical procedures. In the second setting the experts can give advice...

We present an "affirmation as perspective" model of how self-affirmations alleviate threat and defensiveness. Self-threats dominate the working self-concept, leading to a constricted self disproportionately influenced by the threat. Self-affirmations expand the size of the working self-concept, offering a broader perspective in which the threat appears more narrow and self-worth realigns with b...

Match-merging, or BY merging, is the most common merging technique used in SAS**. Yet, how it works is not always obvious. This tutorial shows many of the technique’s nuances and subtleties, gives examples of merges where even experienced programmers have been tripped up, and demonstrates defensive programming strategies.

Raymond Tallis is Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester, but in addition to his medical interests has contributed to philosophy. In this book, professor Tallis reviews the current state of medicine, and observes a dissociation between what medicine has achieved and the way in which it is perceived. He argues that we need to rethink the relationship of medicine to socie...

There is a perception that engineers experience challenges in areas such as communication, conflict resolution, and leadership. Defensive routines are actions implemented as a result of being in an embarrassing or threatening situa‐ tion. This research uses a case study approach to measure whether defensive routines are more common in engineer‐ ing managers or non-engineering managers. Twenty-s...