Key health indicators in Pakistan remain relatively intransigent. While there has been some improvement at intermediate outcome and process levels, several challenges remain, including an inattention to health systems strengthening. Within this context the NGO Heartfile has worked to bring about changes at a health policy and systems level through creation of a policy-level institutional mechan...

Dance involves the culturally mediated body, emotion, and mind. So do illness and pain. Dance may promote wellness by strengthening the immune system through muscular action and physiological processes. Dance conditions an individual to moderate, eliminate, or avoid tension, chronic fatigue, and other disabling conditions that result from the effects of stress. Dance may help the healing proces...

M e t h o d s Data sources: MEDLINE, EMBASE/ Excerpta Medica, CINAHL, PEDro, and the Cochrane Library (all searched to September 2003); and bibliographies of relevant studies. Study selection and assessment: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in English of patients with knee osteoarthritis that compared aerobic walking or homebased quadriceps strengthening exercise with a nonexercise...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between standing balance increased through muscle-strengthening exercises and pain in knee osteoarthritis patients. [Subjects and Methods] Thirty knee osteoarthritis patients were equally divided into a strengthening exercise group and an unstable exercise group. Before and after the six-week experiment, the visual analogue sca...

The diagnosis of back pain in the young athlete should be specific and not attributed to nonspecific, mechanical causes. Risk factor identification and intervention are required. Treatment is then initiated in a specific pattern, addressing flexibility and muscular imbalances. Bracing is often used to allow healing of growth tissue. The lumbosacral orthosis may be molded in a lordotic posture t...

American society has often favored individual rights disproportionately over the common good. In the aftermath of September 11, there is a need to readjust our criteria to allow for the strengthening of security, public safety, and public health policies. At the same time, we must assure that liberties are not trampled in the service of the common good. Clear criteria are needed to help determi...

States and employers use a number of different programs and techniques to increase rates of insurance coverage. Successful strategies--whether based on Medicaid/SCHIP expansion, strengthening employer-based coverage, or regulating the individual market--require both flexibility to tailor approaches that best serve their residents and employees and basic protections to ensure that new programs d...