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Category: Selected Summary
October 01, 2007
Institutions and governance are critical to sound economic policies, income growth and development. To achieve the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of raising global living standards, governments in developing nations have invested heavily in education and health. However, poor governance ...
July 01, 2007
MarMeessen, B, Van Damme W, Kirunga Tashoby C, Tibouti A. Poverty and user fees for public health care in low-income countries: lessons from Uganda and Cambodia. Lancet. 2006; 368:2253-2257.
April 01, 2007
The disease and suffering of disadvantaged people in all countries are a result of the way we organise our societies. In this essay, Marmot argues that failing to meet the fundamental human needs of autonomy, empowerment, and freedom is as important a cause of ill health as economic deprivation. ...
January 01, 2007
The emphasis on personal responsibility in health care stems from the belief that those who follow a healthy lifestyle will be rewarded by feeling better and having to spend less money. A healthy lifestyle is defined as not smoking, frequent exercising, and weight control. However, it is unknown ...
October 01, 2006
Moerman defines the placebo effect as a meaningful and desirable psychological and physiological effect of treatment. In typical randomised control trials (RCTs) patients are randomly allocated to active treatment, placebo treatment and no treatment groups. If the placebo group does substantially...
April 01, 2006
The giving of gifts is an ancient and ubiquitous human activity. However, when a patient gives the gift to her/his doctor, ethical considerations may arise. The author begins the article with the story of an elderly man who walks into the emergency department of a hospital in severe pain. The doc...
July 01, 2006
Therese Hesketh, Li Lu, and Zhu Wei Xing. The effect of China's one-child family policy after 25 years. N Eng J Med 2005; 353: 1171-1176.
January 01, 2006
China is home to one quarter of the world's population, and increasingly its 1.3 billion people have flocked into highly prosperous cities like Shanghai and Beijing. China's gross domestic product (GDP) has grown at 8 per cent for 25 years, making its economy among the world's largest. Yet, the 9...
October 01, 2005
It has become increasingly difficult and expensive to test drugs in western countries, with their strict regulations, elabo-rate safety requirements, and small populations, all of which make the recruitment of research subjects difficult. Consequently, many organisations are now outsourcing some ...
July 01, 2005
Annas GJ. "Culture of Life" politics at the bedside: the case of Terri Schiavo. N Engl J Med 2005; 352: 1710-1715. I was in India during the final phase of the Terri Schiavo case and was surprised at the media attention the case received. The news media failed to address the relevance to India as...