This study compared the degree to which young children were placated during a standard medical evaluation by the presence of their mother, blanket, mother plus blanket, or no supportive agent. Participating were 64 three-year-olds who underwent 4 routine medical procedures. Children were rated by their mothers as attached or nonattached to…

A meta-analysis of 35 interventions to reduce diagnostic testing revealed that testing was reduced overall by 17.6%. Stronger effects were found for immediate reductions (31.7%) compared to reduction at follow-up times (18.7%) and stronger effects were found for interventions targeted at specific tests (23.2%) compared to interventions designed to…

Previous research has shown that expert physicians' diagnostic performance improves when contextual information about a patient is available, while the performance of novices is not influenced by this source of information. These results are explained by supposing that experts' knowledge is organized in illness-scripts. This study examined this…

There is evidence that students who are given information about how they appear to weigh information in reaching a judgment can learn to make judgments more accurately. A microcomputer system was used to generate simulated cases and then calculate the relationship between the data presented and the student's diagnosis. (Author/MLW)

Medical students (N=284) from four Northeastern medical schools interacted with standardized patients, then were given a free-response form (blank form for writing diagnostic impressions) and then they completed a cued-response form, which listed a series of diagnoses generated by the case author. The patients also completed a checklist. (MLW)

Studies in psychology and clinical decision making have shown that research subjects and physicians are often overconfident in the accuracy of their judgments. In these studies, groups of 20 first-year and 27 third-year osteopathic medical students at the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine (Athens) were slightly underconfident in…

The applicability of Rosch and coworkers' concept of prototypes to the mental categorization of medical disorders, and the influence of clinical experience on those memory structures were studied with 100 preclinical medical students and 77 experienced physicians from Quebec, Canada. The third-year medical students were French-speaking and read…

This study examined reasons why novice physicians, even after 6 years of medical education, are apparently unable to utilize a patient's contextual information (age, sex, profession, previous diseases, operations, and medical therapy) in the same accurate manner in disease diagnosis as their more experienced colleagues. Sixteen family physicians,…

Based on selected reading of the literature on medical anthropology and the sociology of modern and traditional system integration in other societies (developing and developed), this paper argues that state heteronomy is patently contraindicated, yet inevitable, should the funding and power structure behind Western health care systems be formally…

A national survey of the health care of international students was conducted to: (1) determine if incidence differences in certain conditons found among international students at the University of Southern California are unique to that institution or typical of other universities; (2) analyze the interaction between health center staff and…

Five types of counties (College-Professional, Urban, Recreational-Retirement, Extractive, and Most Rural) were identified among 83 counties in the Ozark-Ouchita Uplands in order to determine educational and health impacts resulting from the "population turnaround" of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Variables were computed from…