STUDY OBJECTIVE The STONE score is a clinical decision rule that classifies patients with suspected nephrolithiasis into low-, moderate-, and high-score groups, with corresponding probabilities of ureteral stone. We evaluate the STONE score in a multi-institutional cohort compared with physician gestalt and hypothesize that it has a sufficiently high specificity to allow clinicians to defer com...

Physician assistants (PAs) have been used for decades in the Canadian military. Now, PAs are being introduced in various clinical settings to provide patient care for the general population. This article reviews major developments in the PA profession across Canada over the last decade. Nearly 541 PAs are employed in Canada or work for a Canadian agency. Growing evidence demonstrates the positi...

The Licensed Acupuncture Collaborative Study, a job analysis of licensed acupuncturists in California, provides a model for building community-research partnerships between university researchers and communities of non-physician clinicians. The study design used a project-management approach based on the core principles of community-based participatory research: 1) mobilizing shared expertise a...

This study was performed in order to demonstrate that non-occupational physicians are often unaware of the possible role of occupational risk factors in the multifactorial etiology of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Study participants consisted of 229 individuals, 127 cases of CTS matched with 102 controls. In only 41% of the cases did family or attending physicians in the hospital asked the conc...

This commentary follows up on an editorial by Eyal and colleagues in which these authors discuss the implications of the emergence of non-physician clinicians (NPCs) on the health labour market for the education of medical doctors. We generally agree with those authors and we want to stress the importance of clarifying the terminology to describe these practitioners and of defining more formall...

Introduction My belief is that health is beauty and beauty is health. As a naturopathic physician, I have strived to marry the modalities of natural medicine and cosmetic and antiaging medicine. A comprehensive approach to antiaging means not only the assessment of the possible endocrine, metabolic or nutritional imbalances that contribute to aging, especially of the skin or connective tissue; ...

BACKGROUND To identify factors contributing to the high incidence of facility-based obstetric hemorrhage in Thyolo District, Malawi, according to local health workers. METHODS Three focus group discussions among 29 health workers, including nurse-midwives and non-physician clinicians ('medical assistants' and 'clinical officers'). RESULTS Factors contributing to facility-based obstetric hem...