BACKGROUND Living wills are intended to preserve patient autonomy, but recent studies suggest that they do not always have their desired effect. One possible explanation is that living wills do not capture the authentic preferences of the patients who write them but instead reflect transient contextual effects on preferences. PURPOSE Two experiments examined whether end-of-life treatment pref...

Today’s gold standard for medical diagnosis is histology of excised biopsies or surgical specimens where tissue is taken out of the body, processed, sectioned, stained, and looked at under a light microscope by a pathologist. There are many limitations of this technique, including the fact that it is inherently invasive, time consuming, costly, and dangerous for some organs. Furthermore, oftent...

The article of Marc Jamoulle shows the importance of the contribution of general practitioners (GPs) in improving the quality and the efficiency of the health systems. Starting from the concept of quaternary prevention for reducing excessive costs in the preventive procedures, he suggests a change of paradigm in every daily activity of the GP in order to have a stronger ethical approach to the ...

Address for correspondence: Dr. Abimbola Farinde, Clear Lake Regional Medical Center, Webster, Texas 77598, USA. E-mail: [email protected] The geriatric population can be viewed by the medical and scientific community as a particularly unique patient population given the age related changes that can occur over time which can contribute to mental, biologic deterioration, or psychological f...

Event segmentation is the parsing of ongoing activity into meaningful events. Segmenting in a normative fashion-identifying event boundaries similar to others' boundaries-is associated with better memory for and better performance of naturalistic actions. Given this, a reasonable hypothesis is that interventions that improve memory and attention for everyday events could lead to improvement in ...

BACKGROUND It has been estimated that as many as two thirds of patients with schizophrenia are unable to perform basic personal and social roles or activities. Occupational functioning and social functioning, as well as independent living, are considered as core domains of patient functioning. Improvement in patient functioning has also been recognized as an important treatment goal in guidelin...

results urban patients were more likely to receive supplementary information and being strongly encouraged by their nephrologists to seek transplant. all participants acknowledged “independence” as the main advantage of transplantation. increased freedom to travel and improved life expectancy were mentioned only among the urban groups. the main themes in all groups regarding perceived barriers ...

INTRODUCTION The treatment offered to chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients before starting hemodialysis (HD) impacts prognosis. OBJECTIVE We seek differences among incident HD patients according to the distance between home and the dialysis center. METHODS We included 179 CKD patients undergoing HD. Patients were stratified in two groups: "living near the dialysis center" (patients whose h...

The authors describe their experience in the ambulatory treatment of varicocele. Forty-four patients were treated through an infrapubic approach and only one recurrence was observed. The authors conclude that ambulatory treatment of varicoccle is safe, easy to perform and the patient can resume his daily activity within 48.-72 h.