Archives of family medicine
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To develop and test a method for identification and early management of the health and social problems of adolescents, many of which go undetected and untreated. ⋯ A chart-based lesson is well accepted by adolescents and can be used to overcome obstacles for the detection and early management of adolescents' health and social problems.
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To assess the status of office laboratory residency education and training in family practice, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, and pediatric residency programs. ⋯ Family practice residency programs provide more office laboratory training for residents than other specialties. There is a need for improved residency training in the basics of office laboratory practice.
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To determine the importance of various areas of physician competency and to assess the public's ratings of their own physicians. ⋯ Health care consumers and physicians share similar values about what is important in the role of a physician. In the areas of communication and attention to the costs of treatment, public needs are not always being met.
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To learn about parent, nurse, and family physician attitudes toward multiple simultaneous childhood vaccinations. ⋯ Most parents, nurses, and physicians are uncomfortable with three simultaneous injections for children. This discomfort may be a significant barrier to the adoption of the new immunization recommendations. The development of effective combination vaccines should be a research priority.
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My wife's recent illness taught me that patients are not only texts read by their physicians but also the authors of their bodies and stories. As "reader-response" theorists point out, each reading is necessarily a reconstitution of the text. By rewriting in medical terminology, physicians, like literary critics, put patients' texts into more abstract terms, transforming patients into cases and their illnesses into diseases. ⋯ Unlike critics, however, physicians are responsible for the well-being of their patients. They must, therefore, retranslate medical cases back into individual narratives using the patients' language. Thus, patients can retake control of their illnesses and become again the primary authors of their lives.