Postgraduate medicine
-
Lower standards. Waiting lists. ⋯ These are just some of the consequences of national healthcare in Britain, according to the author of this article, a family physician who trained in Scotland. Through a series of extraordinary anecdotes, Dr Anderson comments on Britain's underfunded medical system and the coping mechanisms that doctors rely on to function within it.
-
Postgraduate medicine · May 1994
ReviewAutomated blood pressure monitoring. Should it be used routinely in managing hypertension?
Twenty-four-hour automated blood pressure measurements are representative of and more reliable than casual office blood pressure measurements; they also are more closely correlated with evidence of target-organ damage caused by hypertension and may have better diagnostic specificity. Nevertheless, broad use of automated monitoring in the routine evaluation and management of hypertension has been discouraged because of the lack of prospective epidemiologic studies linking automated measurements to cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, the inability to define a normal range for such measurements, and the cost of the monitoring. However, if it is accepted that conventions established for casual office blood pressure measurements are applicable to data obtained by automated methods, then routine use of automated monitoring is justified, since automated monitoring has better diagnostic capabilities that offset much of its cost.