Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Brain Activity And Medical Diagnosis: An Eeg Study, Laila M. Ribas, Fábio T. Rocha, Neli R. Ortega, Armando F. Rocha, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

Despite new brain imaging techniques that have improved the study of the underlying processes of human decision-making, to the best of our knowledge, there have been very few studies that have attempted to investigate brain activity during medical diagnostic processing.The main purpose of this paper was to investigate brain electroencephalography (EEG) activity associated with diagnostic decision-making in the realm of veterinary medicine using X-rays as a fundamental auxiliary test. The principal component analysis revealed four patterns that accounted for 85% of the total variance in the EEG activity recorded while veterinary doctors read a clinical history, examined an X-ray image …

Preventing Overdiagnosis: How To Stop Harming The Healthy, Ray Moynihan, Jenny Doust, David Henry

Ray Moynihan

Medicine’s much hailed ability to help the sick is fast being challenged by its propensity to harm the healthy. A burgeoning scientific literature is fuelling public concerns that too many people are being overdosed, overtreated, and overdiagnosed. Screening programmes are detecting early cancers that will never cause symptoms or death, sensitive diagnostic technologies identify “abnormalities” so tiny they will remain benign, while widening disease definitions mean people at ever lower risks receive permanent medical labels and lifelong treatments that will fail to benefit many of them. With estimates that more than $200bn (£128bn; €160bn) may be wasted on unnecessary treatment …

Near-Unity Nuclear Polarization With An Open-Source 129xe Hyperpolarizer For Nmr And Mri, Panayiotis Nikolaou, Aaron M. Coffey, Laura L. Walkup, Brogan M. Gust, Nicholas Whiting, Hayley Newton, Scott Barcus, Iga Muradyan, Mikayel Dabaghyan, Gregory D. Moroz, Matthew S. Rosen, Samuel Patz, Michael J. Barlow, Eduard Y. Chekmenev, Boyd M. Goodson

Nicholas Whiting

Preventing Overdiagnosis: How To Stop Harming The Healthy, Ray Moynihan, Jenny Doust, David Henry

Jenny Doust

Medicine’s much hailed ability to help the sick is fast being challenged by its propensity to harm the healthy. A burgeoning scientific literature is fuelling public concerns that too many people are being overdosed, overtreated, and overdiagnosed. Screening programmes are detecting early cancers that will never cause symptoms or death, sensitive diagnostic technologies identify “abnormalities” so tiny they will remain benign, while widening disease definitions mean people at ever lower risks receive permanent medical labels and lifelong treatments that will fail to benefit many of them. With estimates that more than $200bn (£128bn; €160bn) may be wasted on unnecessary treatment …

Development And Initial Validation Of A Simple Clinical Decision Tool To Predict The Presence Of Heart Failure In Primary Care: The Mice (Male, Infarction, Crepitations, Edema) Rule, Andrea Roalfe, Jonathan Mant, Jenny Doust, Pelham Barton, Martin Cowie, Paul Glasziou, David Mant, Richard Mcmanus, Roger Holder, Jonathon Deeks, Robert Doughty, Arno Hoes, Kate Fletcher, F.D.Richard Hobbs

Jenny Doust

Aims: Diagnosis of heart failure in primary care is often inaccurate, and access to and use of echocardiography is suboptimal. This study aimed to develop and provisionally validate a clinical prediction rule to optimize referral for echocardiography of people identified in primary care with suspected heart failure. Methods and results: A systematic review identified studies of diagnosis of heart failure set in primary care. The individual patient data for five of these studies were obtained. Logistic regression models to predict heart failure were developed on one of the data sets and validated on the others using area under the receiver …

The Importance Of Honesty During Prognosis: Personal Injury, Denver S. Burke

Denver S Burke

There is widespread conjecture within the medical profession regarding the impact patient empathy and honesty has on the recovery process. A brief discussion helps explain it in more detail.