BACKGROUND Informal care, the health care provided by the patient's social network is important in low income settings although its monetary value is rarely estimated. The lack of estimates of the value of informal care has led to its omission in economic evaluations but this can result in incorrect decisions about cost effectiveness of an intervention. We explore the use of contingent valuatio...

We commend the American Society of Anesthesiologists for using solid and transparent methods to develop a “top-five” list of low-value activities that should be avoided. We publ i shed this list1 in an ongoing effort to support the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s “Choosing Wisely” campaign aimed at engaging specialty medical societies to identify low-value health care activitie...

  Background: Medicinal plants viz Tinospora cordifolia (Gulvel), Gymnema sylvester (Morasingi), Tricholepis glaberrima (Brahmdandi) are very important for treatment of diabetes mellitus and other various diseases. These plants have great importance due to their nutritive value and major source of medicines as they have been found through out human history  Objective: Evaluation of Nutritive va...

United States health care costs are growing at an unsustainable rate; one significant contributor has been the overuse of health services. Physicians have a professional ethical obligation to serve as stewards of society's resources and take responsibility for health care costs. We propose a framework for identifying overused services and a research and implementation agenda to guide stewardshi...

BACKGROUND Health care office staff and providers may discriminate against people of low socioeconomic status, even in the absence of economic incentives to do so. We sought to determine whether socioeconomic status affects the response a patient receives when seeking a primary care appointment. METHODS In a single unannounced telephone call to a random sample of family physicians and general...

The increasing awareness of the scarcity of health care resources is forcing the health care industry to improve quality while lowering the cost. One method by which employers and insurance companies are attempting to do this is with value-based insurance design. In these plans, patients pay a lower amount for certain services that are considered high value and a higher amount for services that...