Chest
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This series of guidance documents on cough, which will be published over time, is a hybrid of two processes: (1) evidence-based guidelines and (2) trustworthy consensus statements based on a robust and transparent process. ⋯ The resulting guidance statements are based on a rigorous methodology and transparency of process. Unless otherwise stated, the recommendations and suggestions meet the guidelines for trustworthiness developed by the Institute of Medicine and can be applied with confidence by physicians, nurses, other health-care providers, investigators, and patients.
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Allergen-specific immunotherapy (AIT) was described as a therapeutic option for the treatment of allergies > 100 years ago. It is based on administration of allergen extracts and leads to the development of clinical allergen tolerance in selected patients. According to current knowledge, AIT results in the restoration of immune tolerance toward the allergen of interest. ⋯ The disease modification effect leads to decreased disease severity, less drug usage, prevention of future allergen sensitizations, and a long-term curative effect. Increasing safety while maintaining or even augmenting efficiency is the main goal of research for novel vaccine development and improvement of treatment schemes in AIT. This article reviews the principles of allergen-specific immune tolerance development and the effects of AIT in the clinical context.
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Most physicians are unfamiliar with the details of the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) and how changes in the RBRVS influence Medicare and private reimbursement rates. Physicians in a wide variety of settings may benefit from understanding the RBRVS, including physicians who are employees, because many organizations use relative value units as productivity measures. Despite the complexity of the RBRVS, its logic and ideal are simple: In theory, the resource usage (comprising physician work, practice expense, and liability insurance premium costs) for one service is relative to the resource usage of all others. ⋯ Critics have attributed various health-care system problems, including declining and growing gaps between primary care and specialist incomes, to the RUC's role in the RBRVS update process. There are persistent concerns regarding the quality of data used in the process and the potential for services to be overvalued. The Affordable Care Act addresses some of these concerns by increasing payments to primary care physicians, requiring reevaluation of the data underlying work relative value units, and reviewing misvalued codes.
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Throughout medical history, physicians have rarely formed unions and/or carried out strikes. In a profession faced with the turmoil of health reform and increasing pressure to change their practices and lifestyles, will physicians resort to unionization for collective bargaining, and will a strike weapon be used to fight back against the array of corporate and government powers involved in the transformation of the American health-care system? This article examines the question of whether there could be such a thing as an ethical physician strike. Although physicians have not historically used collective bargaining or the strike weapon, the rapidly changing practice environment in the United States might push physicians and other health-care professionals toward unionization. This article considers the ethical questions that would arise if physicians started taking advantage of labor laws, and it lays out criteria for an ethical strike.
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Antiphospholipid syndrome is an autoimmune disorder characterized by a hypercoagulable state, leading to arterial and venous thrombosis. We present a 23-year-old patient, suspected of having Budd-Chiari syndrome due to antiphospholipid syndrome, who developed severe and progressive hypoxemia, requiring prolonged mechanical ventilation. ⋯ Restoring normal blood flow from the azygos vein into the right atrium by stenting the azygos-superior vena cava junction resolved the hypoxemia immediately. Within the same procedure, the hepatic outflow obstruction was successfully treated by stenting a severe stenosis of the suprahepatic inferior vena cava caused by calcified thrombus.