Sixty-six percent of publicly-insured children were unable to get a doctor’s appointment for medical conditions requiring outpatient specialty care including diabetes and seizures, while children with identical symptoms and private insurance were turned away only 11 percent of the time, according to an audit study of 273 specialty physician practices in Cook County, Ill. conducted by researchers from the Pe ...

With an increased emphasis on grading hospitals and a push to withhold payments from hospitals who do not meet certain standards, two Johns Hopkins researchers argue that more attention needs to be paid to the quality of the measurement tools used to praise and punish. The science of outcomes reporting is young and lags behind the desire to publically report adverse medical outcomes, write Elliott R. Haut, ...

A shift toward more conservative medication-prescribing practices would serve patients better, according to a review article published Online First today by Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The article is part of the journal’s Less Is More series. ...

Proposals recommending routine screening of all children for autism gets a thumbs down from researchers at McMaster University. In a study in the online edition of the journal Pediatrics, the researchers say there is “not enough sound evidence to support the implementation of a routine population-based screening program for autism.” ...

Fewer than half of primary care physicians for adults talk to their patients about diet, exercise, and weight management consistently, while pediatricians are somewhat more likely to do so, according to two new studies. These findings come from two National Cancer Institute surveys of family physicians, internists, obstetrician/gynecologists, and pediatricians. Both studies appear online and in the July iss ...

Primary care doctors have long been on the front lines of depression treatment. Depression is listed as a diagnosis for 1 in 10 office visits and primary care doctors prescribe more than half of all antidepressants. Now doctors at the University of Michigan Health System have developed a new tool, which is called Remission Evaluation and Mood Inventory Tool, or REMIT, that may help family physicians better ...

Parents and health care providers cannot always tell whether toddlers display signs of autism syndrome disorder (ASD), but new research from the University of Utah shows that a significant portion of at-risk children between 14-24 months can be identified through systematic screening by autism experts and providers working together. ...

Medicare beneficiaries residing in areas with higher levels of primary care physicians per population have modestly lower death rates and fewer preventable hospitalizations, according to a study in the May 25 issue of JAMA. Chiang-Hua Chang, Ph.D., of Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, N.H., and colleagues conducted the study. ...

A recent survey, led by McGill Psychiatry Professor and Senior Lady Davis Institute Researcher Amir Raz, reports that one in five respondents – physicians and psychiatrists in Canadian medical schools – have administered or prescribed a placebo. Moreover, an even higher proportion of psychiatrists (more than 35 per cent) reported prescribing subtherapeutic doses of medication (that is, doses that are below, ...

More than a third of Americans use some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and that number continues to rise attributed mostly to increases in the use of mind-body therapies (MBT) like yoga, meditation, and deep breathing exercises. The results of the study appear in the May 9 issue of theArchives of Internal Medicine. ...