高职高专护理专业医学英语词汇教学初探

本文从教学实际出发介绍了在专科护理专业中医学英语词汇教学的一系列教学方法。在实际开展中,这些方法提高了学生的学习兴趣,提升了教学质量,为学生未来在工作中运用医学英语打下了基础。     

颈椎椎弓根个体化固定技术治疗261例颈椎疾患临床观察

目的:探讨颈椎椎弓根内固定技术在颈椎疾患的个体化方案设计及临床疗效。方法:对261例颈椎疾患,置入1102枚椎弓根螺钉,其中上颈椎疾患83例,下颈椎疾患178例。应用图像存储传输系统(picture archiving and communication system,PACS),采用X线片及64排CT片,对2 000例正常人颈椎椎弓根的冠状位、矢状位、横断位进行精确测量,得出中国人椎弓根的长度、宽度、高度、向内侧倾斜、向头、尾侧倾斜角度的数据值。术前对每位患者拟固定颈椎的椎弓根精确测量,术中应用自制的颈椎椎弓根定位导向器,准确定位入钉点及角度。结果:一次成功1 086枚,16枚经调整后成功,一次成功率98.55%。术后235例患者获12～73个月随访,平均随访时间18.74个月。采用JOA评分标准[1],优131例,良82例,可17例,差5例,优良率88.1%。所有患者X线片示寰椎完全复位,枢椎齿状突骨折处对位良好,均获得骨性融合,未发现钉板断裂。CT片示螺钉与椎动脉及脊髓位置关系良好。下颈椎患者中,15例患者16枚椎弓根螺钉术后拍片位置不理想,行二次手术调整,无脊髓及椎动脉损伤。119例骨折脱位的患者中117例完全复位,融合率为98.3%。结论:应用椎弓根技术治疗颈椎疾患可以获得即刻三维稳定,融合率高,是一种可行值得推广的方法。     

Emotionally positive stimuli facilitate lexical decisions-an ERP study

The influence of briefly presented positive and negative emotional pictures on lexical decisions on positive, negative and neutral words or pseudowords was investigated. Behavioural reactions were the fastest following all positive stimuli and most accurate for positive words. Stimulus-locked ERPs revealed enhanced early posterior and late parietal attention effects following positive pictures. A small neural affective priming effect was reflected by P3 modulation, indicating more attention allocation to affectively incongruent prime-target pairs. N400 was insensitive to emotion. Response-locked ERPs revealed an early fronto-central negativity from 480 ms before reactions to positive words. It was generated in both fronto-central and extra-striate visual areas, demonstrating a contribution of perceptual and, notably, motor preparation processes. Thus, no behavioural and little neural evidence for congruency-driven affective priming with emotional pictures was found, but positive stimuli generally facilitated lexical decisions, not only enhancing perception, but also acting rapidly on response preparation and by-passing full semantic analysis.     

Cannabis induces different cognitive changes in schizophrenic patients and in healthy controls

It is known that 60 to 80% of schizophrenic patients show deficits in cognition. There may be an increase in these deficits as a result of additional regular use of cannabis. The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of chronic cannabis consumption on the cognitive functions of schizophrenic patients and healthy control subjects after a minimum abstinence time of 28 days. The study sample consisted of 39 schizophrenics (19 cannabis-abusers and 20 non-abusers) and 39 healthy controls (18 cannabis-abusers, 21 non-abusers). In a 2x2-factorial design (Diagnostic Groups [healthy controls, schizophrenic patients]xCannabis abuse [without, with]) with diagnostic group and cannabis consumption considered between-subject factors) we tested the hypothesis that dually diagnosed patients (i.e. suffering both from schizophrenia and cannabis abuse) perform worse in neuropsychological tests than schizophrenic patients without cannabis abuse. On the whole, schizophrenic patients performed worse than healthy control subjects. Surprisingly, rather than deteriorating neuropsychological performance, regular cannabis abuse prior to the first psychotic episode improved cognition in some tests. This was even more pronounced when regular consumption started before the age of 17. On the other hand, cannabis use deteriorated test performance in healthy controls, especially in cases when regular consumption started before the age of 17. To sum up, regular cannabis abuse has a different effect on cognitive function in schizophrenic patients and healthy controls.     

Lexicon creation to promote faculty development in medical communication

OBJECTIVE: Most medical educators have little or no training in teaching and assessing medical communication, and they are not consistent in what they teach. The authors set out to reach consensus in our educational community on a lexicon of communication terms for use in teaching physician-patient communication skills to second-year medical students. METHODS: An interdisciplinary medical school physician-patient communication committee assembled 23 important terms and agreed on definitions for each term. Thirty core preclinical faculty representing nine medical specialties reviewed the lexicon. Faculty were surveyed about lexicon definitions, barriers to use, and methods of using during educational encounters. RESULTS: All preclinical faculty members agreed on 19 out of 23 definitions and most respondents agreed on the definitions of the remaining four terms. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they used the terms during their teaching encounters. CONCLUSION: Implementing a process to create a shared language around physician-patient communication may help unify and enhance faculty educational efforts. We were able to establish that medical educators can agree on the content of a medical communication lexicon for use with students. The use of defined and consistently used terms in multiple venues may reduce ambiguity, standardize teaching, enhance recognition of communication skills, and promote effective reinforcement and remediation by faculty. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Evidence suggests that most medical educators have little or no training in teaching and assessing medical communication and that they are not consistent in what they teach. Asking a community of faculty to share responsibility for creating a communication lexicon may be an efficient and effective way to educate faculty and unify their educational effort.     

Controlled vocabulary in public health. An overview of the achievements to date

Aim  The aim of the article is to present both published and unpublished information materials based on the literature review related to the accomplishments in the area of development and unification of the public health terminology. Background  Public health is a multidisciplinary field that has long been struggling with the need to develop comprehensive and exhaustive terminology that would cover all related disciplines, facilitate accurate understanding of terms, aid information search and processing, as well as permit an accurate scientific communication among public health professionals. This is not an easy task given the theoretical and practical scope of the discipline. Summary of the resources  The following bibliographical databases were searched: LISA, PubMED, EMBASE, ERIC, as well as Internet websites devoted to public health issues, websites of the institutions operating in this area, and databases of projects financed by the European Union. All national and international reports in English, French, or German that dealt with the development of public health terminology in respective languages were included in the search. The glossaries, documents, databases, or web pages related to the activities of single institutions were excluded. Finally 13 glossaries were selected from among a number of different dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauruses that cover the terms used in public health discipline or its sub-disciplines. The selected glossaries were developed in order to unify the terminology with their intended circulation exceeding the narrow aim of collecting terminology for the purpose of one project or for cataloguing the resources of a particular institution. Conclusion  Until now, no one has developed one universal public health terminology, but various attempts related to its normalization are underway. The difficulties in communication, electronic collection, and transfer of information as well as differences in the understanding of public health terms have led to the process of unification. Such a process has been perceived not only in individual countries, but also internationally. There is hope that such works will finally result in the desired and internationally unified understanding of public health terms.     

Aging memory for pictures: using high-density event-related potentials to understand the effect of aging on the picture superiority effect

High-density event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to understand the effect of aging on the neural correlates of the picture superiority effect. Pictures and words were systematically varied at study and test while ERPs were recorded at retrieval. Here, the results of the word-word and picture-picture study-test conditions are presented. Behavioral results showed that older adults demonstrated the picture superiority effect to a greater extent than younger adults. The ERP data helped to explain these findings. The early frontal effect, parietal effect, and late frontal effect were all indistinguishable between older and younger adults for pictures. In contrast, for words, the early frontal and parietal effects were significantly diminished for the older adults compared to the younger adults. These two old/new effects have been linked to familiarity and recollection, respectively, and the authors speculate that these processes are impaired for word-based memory in the course of healthy aging. The findings of this study suggest that pictures allow older adults to compensate for their impaired memorial processes, and may allow these memorial components to function more effectively in older adults.     

Teaching Young People who are Blind and have Autism to Make Requests Using a Variation on the Picture Exchange Communication System with Tactile Symbols: A Preliminary Investigation

This study used a single-subject multiple baseline across participants design to evaluate the effectiveness of a modified picture exchange communication system (PECS) teaching protocol with tactile symbols. Three students (two male, one female) aged 12-17 years who had autism and were blind participated in the study. The instructional program involved three phases. First, each participant learned to exchange a tactile symbol with his/her communication partner to request a preferred item/activity. Second, the distance between the communication partner and the participant was increased. Third, the participants were required to discriminate between two dissimilar tactile symbols. One out of three participants completed all phases of the instructional program. Although the other two participants did not complete the program, they demonstrated improvement from baseline responding rates. This study provided preliminary results that using tactile symbols with strategies from PECS may be an effective method to teach requesting to youth who are blind and have autism.     

Visual Teaching Strategies for Children with Autism

Most traditional teaching methods used in working with autistic children rely heavily on auditory instruction. Autism is a spectrum disorder, with a wide variety of needs and abilities within the range of children with the disability, and not all children within this grouping benefit from copious oral instruction. This paper discusses the type of child that would benefit from an educational approach that emphasises a visual approach and discusses the benefits and disadvantages of some of the more well known of these.     

Filmless radiology in the Emergency Department

The introduction of standardization in image formatting allowed the development of a picture archiving and communication system, or filmless radiology. In practice, we have found advantages in quick access and availability, image manipulation, and cost savings to outweigh the disadvantages of portability and system down time.