Microepidermabrasion: an adjunct to medical skin care.

Microepidermabrasion has become a common modality in aesthetic skin care in doctor's offices as well as in the hands of skin care specialists. The basics of particle beam resurfacing are discussed, with an emphasis on patient selection, technique, and after care. Concerns about current technology are reviewed, and insight into the evolution of new technologies is given.     

De-coupling of cognitive performance and cerebral functional response during working memory in schizophrenia.

Working memory dysfunction is considered to be fundamental to the cognitive and clinical features evident in schizophrenia. Functional neuroimaging studies have begun to elucidate the neurobiological basis of such deficits, however, interpretation of these studies may be confounded by performance impairment, when the cognitive load exceeds the limited response capacity of patients with schizophrenia. In this study, patients were pre-selected on the basis of intact performance on a relatively low-load verbal working memory task, in order to mitigate against performance confounds. Subjects included 20 right-handed male subjects with chronic schizophrenia, and 20 right-handed, age-matched, male healthy controls, without personal or familial psychiatric history. All subjects underwent fMRI scanning whilst performing a verbal n-back task. There were no significant between-group differences in target identification; the patient group showed a significantly increased mean response latency. Both groups demonstrated robust fronto-parietal activation. In the control subjects, the power of functional response was positively correlated with reaction time in bilateral posterior parietal cortex, however, this coupling of behavioural performance and cerebral response was not evident in the patients. This deficit, apparent within the performance capacity of the patients, may represent a fundamental abnormality in schizophrenia, and may compromise performance at higher cognitive loads.     

Epidural anaesthesia for Caesarean section in patients with active recurrent genital herpes simplex infections: a retrospective review

The safety of epidural anaesthesia in patients with active, recurrent genital herpes simplex (HSV) infections is controversial. We reviewed the six-year experience of the use of epidural anaesthesia in this patient population in two institutions. Eighty-nine parturients with active genital HSV were administered epidural anaesthesia for Caesarean section. No patient suffered an adverse outcome related to either the anaesthetic or the virus. The theoretical risks of regional anaesthesia in the parturient with active herpes genitalis are reviewed. We conclude from available data that the risk of an adverse outcome is small and does not contraindicate the use of epidural anaesthesia in patients with recurrent infection.     

Training Synergies Between Medical Informatics and Health Services Research: Successes and Challenges

Stanford''s two decades of success in linking medical informatics and health services research in both training and investigational activities reflects advantageous geography and history as well as natural synergies in the two areas. Health services research and medical informatics at Stanford have long shared a quantitative, analytic orientation, along with linked administration, curriculum, and clinical activities. Both the medical informatics and the health services research curricula draw on diverse course offerings throughout the university, and both the training and research overlap in such areas as outcomes research, large database analysis, and decision analysis/decision support. The Stanford experience suggests that successful integration of programs in medical informatics and health services research requires areas of overlapping or synergistic interest and activity among the involved faculty and, hence, in time, among the students. This is enhanced by a mixture of casual and structured contact among students from both disciplines, including social interactions. The challenges to integration are how to overcome any geographic separation that may exist in a given institution; the proper management of relationships with those sub-areas of medical informatics that have less overlap with health services research; and the need to determine how best to exploit opportunities for collaboration that naturally occur.Training in medical informatics and health services research has been closely linked at Stanford University for almost two decades. Although the close linkage was deliberate, it was facilitated by historical circumstances, in particular the common academic structures in which both programs arose. In this paper, we describe some of that rationale and history, identifying the areas of overlap that we have pursued in coordinating the training opportunities for graduate students and fellows in both areas of study. As we shall note, the synergies have been great, and in some cases trainees have collaborated closely on research while also taking some of the same courses. We believe that these interactions can be a model for the design of training programs that encourage scholarly interactions between medical informatics and health services research. Although our initial charge was to describe both the successes and failures in integrating the programs, we found that we could not identify any outright failures and that it would be better to delineate the complexities and challenges that we have faced in bringing together these two disciplines.     

Synthesis and Properties of Haptens for the Development of Radioimmunoassays for Thioridazine,Mesoridazine, and Sulforidazine

For the separate development of radioimmunoassay procedures for thioridazine and its two major active metabolites, mesoridazine and sulforidazine, three haptens, respectively, 2-methylthio-, 2-methylsulfinyl-, and 2-methylsulfonyl-substituted 10-[2-[l-(2-carboxyethyl)-2-piperidinyl]ethyl]-10H-phenothiazine, were synthesized and characterized. Thioridazine hapten was coupled to bovine serum albumin, whereas the haptens for mesoridazine and sulforidazine were coupled to porcine thyroglobulin. The number of hapten residues per mole of carrier protein was determined in each case by an ultraviolet spectrophotometric method. Polyclonal antibodies to each hapten–protein conjugate were obtained in rabbits, and titers of the antisera were checked by evaluating their binding characteristics to the appropriate tritiated analyte. A hapten for the ring sulfoxide metabolite of thioridazine was also synthesized.     

Treatment of mandibular condylar process fractures: biological considerations.

The topic of condylar injury in adults has generated more discussion and controversy than any other in the field of maxillofacial trauma. It is an important subject because such injuries are common and complications of trauma to the temporomandibular joint (TMJ) are far-reaching in their effects. Why are there so many different methods to treat this injury? How can seemingly disparate treatment options all produce satisfactory outcomes in the majority of patients? The reason lies with the biological adaptations that occur within the masticatory system that are poorly understood, not readily quantifiable, and variable from one person to the next. This discussion presents our current understanding of the adaptations that must occur to provide the patient with a satisfactory outcome. The adaptations for patients treated open are different than for those treated closed. However, it is when these adaptations fail to occur that unsatisfactory outcomes occur, regardless of how they were treated.     

Significant efficiency findings while controlling for the frequent confounders of CAI research in the PlanAlyzer project's computer-based,self-paced,case-based programs in anemia and chest pain diagnosis

Richard E. Clark in his widely published comprehensive studies and meta-analyses of the literature on computer assisted instruction (CAI) has decried the lack of carefully controlled research, challenging almost every study which shows the computer-based intervention to result in significant post-test proficiency gains over a non-computer-based intervention. We report on a randomized study in a medical school setting where the usual confounders found by Clark to plague most research, were carefully controlled. PlanAlyzer is a microcomputer-based, self-paced, case-based, event-driven system for medical education which was developed and used in carefully controlled trials in a second year medical school curriculum to test the hypothesis that students with access to the interactive programs could integrate their didactic knowledge more effectively and/or efficiently than with access only to traditional textual “nonintelligent” materials. PlanAlyzer presents cases, elicits and critiques a student's approach to the diagnosis of two common medical disorders: anemias and chest pain. PlanAlyzer uses text, hypertext, images and critiquing theory. Students were randomized, one half becoming the experimental group who received the interactive PlanAlyzer cases in anemia, the other half becoming the controls who received the exact same content material in a text format. Later in each year there was a crossover, the controls becoming the experimentals for a similar intervention with the cardiology PlanAlyzer cases. Preliminary results at the end of the first two full trials shows that the programs have achieved most of the proposed instructional objectives, plus some significant efficiency and economy gains. 96 faculty hours of classroom time were saved by using PlanAlyzer in their place, while maintaining high student achievement. In terms of student proficiency and efficiency, the 328 students in the trials over two years were able to accomplish the project's instructional objectives, and the experimentals accomplished this in 43% less time than the controls, achieving the same level of mastery. However, in spite of these significant efficiency findings, there have been no significant proficiency differences (as measured by current factual and higher order multiple choice post-tests) between the experimental and control groups. Very careful controls were used to avoid what Clark has found to be the most common confounders of CAI research. Accordingly, this research proved Clark's rival hypothesis, that the computer, in itself, does not appear to contribute to proficiency gains, at least as measured by our limited post-testing. Clark's position is that the computer is primarily a vehicle—as is either a pill or a hypodermic needle for delivering a drug. The hypodermic needle can deliver the drug more efficiently than can the pill, (as can the computer deliver the subject matter content more efficiently, as our research indicates), but the same content is delivered. At the same time, we proved our own hypothesis, as far as efficiency gains resulting from the computer are concerned. However, going beyond Clark's research, we may be teaching processes both more effectively and efficiently with the computer (experience in problem-solving or clinical reasoning and pattern recognition) which our current post-tests do not adequately measure. Our on-going research suggests additional inquiry in several areas: better evaluation instruments to measure the clinical reasoning skills PlanAlyzer was designed to teach; the addition of more advanced cases to determine if this might transform efficiency gains of the computer group into proficiency gains; the addition of enhanced graphic decision support tools and other pedagogical enhancements including cognitive feedback to strengthen PlanAlyzer's power to teach complex concepts of medical decision-making.