INTRODUCTION Sri Lanka has a population of 21 million and about 80,000 snakebites occur annually. However, there are limited data on health seeking behavior following bites. We investigated the effects of snakebite and envenoming on health seeking behavior in Sri Lanka. METHODS In a community-based island-wide survey conducted in Sri Lanka 44,136 households were sampled using a multistage clu...

The authors used the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey: 1999 Summary to compare the practice patterns of osteopathic and allopathic physicians in the management of musculoskeletal disorders in family practice settings. Patient and physician characteristics, diagnostic test ordering patterns, treatments, and amount of time spent with patients during visits were compared. Patients who visit...

INTRODUCTION Research into opinions about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has focused on conventional medical practitioners with little exploration of CAM practitioners' views. PURPOSE To survey attitudes and practices of massage therapists toward conventional medicine. RESEARCH DESIGN An anonymous online survey consisting of Likert-type scales, fill-in answers, and multiple-ch...

This paper examines the relationships between service providers involved in caring for people with 'psychosis' in Uganda. Data from qualitative research investigating conceptualisations of 'madness' held by indigenous, religious and allopathic healers in urban Uganda are used to explore the attitudes of these different service providers towards each other. Case-vignettes of individuals with a d...

BACKGROUND Osteopathic medical school graduates, who are entering allopathic residencies in increasing numbers, want to maintain their osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM) skills, but such residency programs do not include osteopathic curricula. OBJECTIVES To describe the development and implementation of an osteopathic curriculum within an allopathic family medicine residency, and to eval...

CONTEXT Migraine headache is highly prevalent in the United States, resulting in large healthcare expenditures. OBJECTIVE To determine whether the use of osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) at an osteopathic family practice residency clinic affected the cost of treating patients with migraine headache, compared with non-OMT care at the osteopathic clinic and care at an allopathic family ...

To the Editor: There has been much searching for reasons to explain the increases in upper respiratory tract–related diseases over the past 25 years. Schappert’s data show that ear infections more than doubled between 1975 and 1990,1 and extrapolating his curve to the present suggests that by now this would have tripled. Although there are no national statistics for sinusitis, consensus points ...

This is a pharmaeconomic study to assess the impact of different, cost-specific pharmacological strategies on the recurrence rate of prescriptions in the treatment of cold symptoms. Data were obtained from a prospective cohort study reporting individual prescriptions histories of subjects experiencing cold symptoms, obtained by a stratified random sample of 316 subjects, clustered into 139 Ital...

Patient characteristics, chief complaints, and diagnoses can be used to specify the examination content for performance-based assessments of clinical skills. The purpose of this investigation was to explore osteopathic and allopathic medical practice patterns and to provide summary statistics that can be used to delimit potential assessment content areas for a clinical skills assessment targete...

CONTEXT The establishment of a single accreditation system for graduate medical education in the United States suggests a convergence of osteopathic and allopathic medicine. OBJECTIVE To compare the characteristics of medical care provided by osteopathic and allopathic physicians. METHODS Five-year data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey were used to study patient visits for p...