The modern history of sports medicine is chronicled in a discussion of the first writings in English on sports medicine. What may have been the first writing in English is a section on first aid in the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SPORT, published in England in 1898. It describes injuries commonly sustained in angling, boxing, cricket, cycling, football,…

The goal of this paper is to explore a number of examples of the censorship of women's healthcare issues and to investigate issues and questions related to those examples. The paper looks primarily at censorship in the United States; however, the problems and issues discussed are international in scope, and some international examples are…

A study was conducted to determine the SMOG readability formula scores of currently available patient education materials. It was hypothesized that the reading level of the materials would be higher than 7.5, the reading level of the average American citizen; and that there would be a significant reduction in the measured document reading levels…

Data suggest that acquaintance and date rape may account for 50-70 percent of all reported rapes in the United States. Recent findings also indicate that one in four college women have been raped or a victim of attempted rape. As most rape victims are between 15 and 24 years of age, high school-based education programs must be provided if society…

Describes a methodology for collecting and extracting linguistic forms from documents authored by healthcare consumers. The forms were mapped to concepts and the resulting terms were analyzed. Although the case study uses examples from a "consumer medical vocabulary," procedures are applicable to investigating non-professional vocabularies in…

Research has shown that medical self-care holds promise in not only improving health, but also in potentially reducing the cost of medical care. A study was conducted to evaluate the perceived impact of the distribution of a self-care book on members of a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, area. Data were…

To discover the components of a trustworthy source, a study evaluated the credibility of health-related news stories. Subjects, 192 college undergraduates, read one of four random versions of a one-page newspaper story about aspirin's ability to ward off heart attacks. They were told that the sources for the articles were: a medical journal (high…

Children under 3 years of age who are in group care face special health risks. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control indicate the existence of a causal relationship between infant group day care and certain diseases that are spread through contact at day care centers. Children in group care who are still in diapers are especially vulnerable to…

This paper reports on the ongoing development of PERSIVAL (Personalized Retrieval and Summarization of Image, Video, and Language), a system designed to provide personalized access to a distributed digital library of medical literature and consumer health information. The goal for PERSIVAL is to tailor search, presentation, and summarization of…

A pamphlet, "AIDS and You," was designed for use with high school special education students. The pamphlet discusses the progression of the disease, prevention methods, and a series of scenarios reflective of teenagers' dilemmas. The scenarios are intended to serve as a basis for class discussion or for use by parents for values…

The situational and personal factors affecting the usage of a computer based information service by health care professionals are described. Of 166 health care professionals who were identified as potential users of MEDLINE at the University of Connecticut, 126 carried out one or more online searches. Pre-use and post-use questionnaires were…

A study measured the connotations of selected health education related journals to their professional readers. The subjects were 250 randomly selected, college-affiliated health educators listed in "A National Directory of College and University Health Education Programs and Facilities 1981." Journals evaluated included: (1) "American College…

The National Library of Medicine is supporting a research project on full-text search and retrieval. The project includes a fully deployed system, HSTAT, to provide access to government-supported health information. The retrieval system is an object-oriented client-server model and the data is stored in an object-oriented database management…

The purpose of this pilot study was to determine the contributions of computerized health risk appraisal when used as a supplement to the traditional methods of health instruction. Subjects were a convenience sample of 26 students enrolled in a university level, personal health course. Using a one group pretest posttest design, these subjects were…

A pilot project examined the effectiveness of computer assisted instruction (CAI) in teaching selected concepts of health and fitness: coronary risk, lifestyle, and nutrition as related to weight control. A convenience sample of 58 students from two Concepts of Health and Fitness classes were randomly assigned to two groups, both of which used…