Journal of general internal medicine
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Observational Study
"It Sometimes Doesn't Even Work": Patient Opioid Assessments as Clues to Therapeutic Flexibility in Primary Care.
Physicians' fear of difficult patient interactions is an important barrier to discontinuing long-term opioid therapy. ⋯ Patient statements suggesting openness to non-opioid pain treatments or lower opioid doses are common during routine primary care visits. Listening for and exploring these clues may be a patient-centered strategy for broaching difficult topics with patients on long-term opioid therapy.
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Prior meta-analyses measuring thiazide-induced glycemic change have demonstrated an increased risk of incident diabetes; however, this measure's definition has changed over time. ⋯ Thiazide diuretics have a small and clinically unimportant impact on FPG.
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Systematic reviews are a necessary, but often insufficient, source of information to address the decision-making needs of health systems. In this paper, we address when and how the use of health system data might make systematic reviews more useful to decision-makers. ⋯ We also offer recommendations to improve the transparency of reporting when using health system data alongside systematic reviews including providing rationale for employing additional data, details on the data source, critical appraisal to understand study design biases as well as limitations in data and information quality, and how the unpublished data compares to the systematically reviewed data. Future methodological work on how best to handle internal and external validity concerns of health system data in the context of systematically reviewed data and work on developing infrastructure to do this type of work is needed.
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The Veterans Health Administration (VA) recently has been scrutinized for prolonged wait times for routine medical care, including elective outpatient procedures such as colonoscopy. Wait times for colonoscopy following positive fecal occult blood test (FOBT) are associated with worse clinical outcomes only if greater than 6 months. ⋯ Wait times for colonoscopy for positive FOBT have been stable over time. Despite the perception of prolonged VA wait times, wait times for outpatient colonoscopy for positive FOBT are well below the threshold at which clinically meaningful differences in patient outcomes have been observed.