More articles from Medical Grand Rounds
- Can the patient make treatment decisions? Evaluating decisional capacity
Evaluations of a patient's ability to make treatment decisions are common in everyday practice. Dr. Agich reviews the standards for evaluating decisional capacity.
- Is intensive glycemic control worth the expense?
Is tight control of glucose levels cost-effective for type I diabetes? And what about type II diabetes?
- Low back pain: Living with ambiguity
Ambiguity is a fact of life in treating acute low back pain, frustrating physicians and patients alike.
- Evaluating adrenal incidentalomas
Adrenal incidentalomas are detected on approximately 1% to 2% of all abdominal CT scans. The question is, how clinically significant are they?
- New treatment options for epilepsy
The four newest anticonvulsant drugs— gabapentin, lamotrigine, felbamate, and topiramate—offer some advantages over older agents.
- Disturbing asthma statistics reflect suboptimal management
Beta agonists are used too often and inhaled steroids too little. Leukotrine receptor antagonists will be an important new asthma therapy, but allergy shots remain controversial.
- Beyond statistics: What is really important in medicine?
Clinicians should apply clinical reasoning when interpreting trial results, and researchers should find better ways of measuring “soft” outcomes, such as quality of life.
- Reperfusion for acute myocardial infarction: 1997 and beyond
The optimal thrombolytic therapy will be a cocktail of several thrombolytic, antithrombotic, and antiplatelet agents, each of which attacks different pathways of clot formation.
- The constitutionality of physician-assisted suicide: the cases and issues before the US Supreme Court
How the Court rules on physician-assisted suicide will spur further legal debate for decades.
- Eradication of polio and guinea worm disease
Two ancient scourges of mankind will soon follow smallpox into extinction if World Health Organization campaigns are successful.