Family medicine
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This study sought to identify the attitudes of family practice residents toward journal clubs and the effect that preparing a journal club session has on the resident's view of the medical literature. Residents from Valley Medical Center were prospectively assessed over a three-year period. ⋯ However, they reported that their journal club experiences did not improve their opinions of the journals selected. The results are discussed in the context of recent trends in journal clubs.
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Although humanism has emerged as an important issue in medical education and practice, there is no standardized definition of humanism or an instrument that measures patients' perceptions of their physician's level of humanism. This study addressed these three issues: 1) A definition of physician humanism was developed based on the current literature; 2) an instrument was designed that measured patients' perceptions of humanism in their family physicians; and 3) health outcome variables were measured relative to these perceptions. The design was a cross-sectional survey of 185 randomly selected patients from two family practice sites. ⋯ A positive association was found between perceived physician humanism and patient satisfaction. Greater success in patients' attempts to quit smoking was associated with higher physician humanism. The implications of these findings for evaluation and training of health care providers and patients' use of health care services are discussed.
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Requesting and sending reprints of articles published in the medical literature is an established tradition. This survey of authors of family medicine literature found that 54% believed the tradition should be continued, and 43% felt reprints meet a real need. ⋯ Those authors who paid the cost out of their own pockets were significantly more likely to view reprints as useful and more likely to respond to requests. Support for innovative ways of disseminating information, ways that may meet needs that reprints do not, is potentially available.
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A questionnaire was sent to directors of all family medicine-affiliated geriatric fellowship programs to characterize trends and changes since institution of ACGME accreditation of fellowships. The number of fellowships has more than doubled since 1986, but few fellows graduate from these programs. There is currently a surplus of fellowship positions; over half of all programs did not recruit a first-year fellow for the 1989 academic year. ⋯ Almost half of the programs are now jointly sponsored with an internal medicine department. These programs are over six times more likely to train internists than family physicians. Although there has been a growth in geriatric training programs over the past three years, the number of family physicians seeking such training remains negligible.
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Historical Article
Misconduct in science: does family medicine have a problem?
Through several recent and widely publicized cases, misconduct in science has caught the public's attention and reached the agenda of Congress. After a brief historical overview, this article presents a number of cases from family medicine raising issues of duplicate publication, plagiarism, inappropriate authorship, citation errors, inappropriate attribution, and data manipulation and fabrication. Misconduct policies from national organizations are noted, and specific recommendations are made that would limit growth of misconduct in the family medicine research community.