bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Needed—A Good Basic Communication Course
Authors: Mambert W. A. 
Published: May 2005

It is tragically interesting that throughout the first twelve years of formal education in our society, the typical school curriculum does not contain a single course of study in idea handling and communication. In most college curricula, the art and techniques are confusingly taught and de-emphasized, largely because of specialization and professional parochialism. The net result is that our present system of personal development has produced a generation and a half of nonthinkers and noncopers. This paper argues that a proper synthesis of the skills of perception, inquiry, problem solving, and communication can be taught as such in a single course of study, preferably in high school or even before, but most certainly at least in college. The author describes a semester-length “idea-handling and communication core” course designed to supplant several traditional high-school and college courses, or for adult education.
Possible Sequelae of Trauma and Somatic Disorder in Early Life
Authors: Weinberger Jerome L. , Kantor Martin 
Published: May 2005

All children experience trauma. The age, state of development and constitutional factors will determine whether some children will have a traumatic effect. Trauma occurring before the age of three, at a time when the ego has not developed its synthetic and integrative functions, may be reproduced in later life as an isolated symptom, by selected sensations involved in a sensory imprint or screen sensation of the trauma as a simple recording. After the age of three, under the influence of a more mature ego, excessive traumatic stimuli will be integrated and elaborated in symptom formations as phobias or other conditions and extended as part of the total personality. Recurrence in later life is triggered by events related not only to the original experience, but also to the content of its elaboration. The earlier in life the trauma occurs, the more likely that somatic imprints of primitive physiological symptoms would result as an archaic, biological defense or screen sensations. Recurrent sensory imprints or screens may appear as organic illness or functional somatic symptoms. Diagnostically, a detailed early life history is necessary to uncover the presence of a sensory screen memory of a trauma and so avoid diagnostic medical search for organic causation. Case material illustrating the two groups are presented. Indications for psychoanalysis and for supportive psychotherapy are discussed from our theoretical framework as well as from the literature.
Decision Logic Tables: A New Approach for Administrators in Making, Documenting and Communicating Their Decisions
Authors: Crane Roger 
Published: May 2005

A description of the characteristics of decision tables—guidelines and examples—are offered to educational administrators as an efficient alternative to linear prose and flowchart formats. Described are three types of decision tables: limited entry, extended entry and mixed entry tables. Completeness checks and rule compression are also explained. Decision tables provide an excellent means of describing the relationship between antecedent conditions and innovative actions. When properly utilized, decision tables can bring clarity, accuracy and analysis to the decision making process.
Physician Willingness to Refer Older Depressed Patients for Psychotherapy
Authors: Alvidrez Jennifer , Areán Patricia A. 
Published: May 2005

Objective: Psychotherapy for late-life depression is an efficacious treatment option for older primary care patients who do not wish to take or do not respond to antidepressant medication. However, rates of physician referral to psychotherapy to treat late-life depression tend to be low. The purpose of this study was to assess attitudes toward psychotherapy for late-life depression and to identify predictors of physician willingness to refer older patients to psychotherapy. Methods: Two hundred and five physicians identified from PPO directories of general internists in California and North Carolina completed a brief mailed survey about how they would treat a hypothetical older depressed patient and specific attitudes and practices regarding their own treatment of late-life depression. Results: Only 27 percent of physicians said they would refer a depressed older patient to psychotherapy. In a regression analysis, female gender, the belief that psychotherapy is effective for older adults, and physician use of psychosocial techniques were associated with increased willingness to refer to psychotherapy. Practicing in North Carolina, awareness of depression treatment guidelines, and the perception of patient willingness to attend psychoeducational classes on depression and medication management were associated with decreased willingness to refer. Conclusions: More efforts are needed to increase the use of referral to psychotherapy as a treatment option for older medical patients. Education about guideline-level treatment alone may not be sufficient. More specific education, including information about the efficacy of psychotherapy for older adults, as well as direct training in psychosocial techniques, may be helpful in promoting referral to psychotherapy.
Modular Learning in Electrical Engineering
Authors: Waks Shlomo 
Published: May 2005

A learning module specially suited for subjects in technology and engineering is presented. Its main features are: Integration of theory and laboratory experimentation; integration of individualized mastery learning with frontal instruction; orientation from system to components; remedy learning material prepared ahead of time. The learning package is of cybernetic nature: A net of feedback loops is built into the module so that faults are detected by the learner on the spot and adequate corrective (remedial) measures are taken immediately, so as to minimize cumulative lagging in the learning process.
Neuroticism, other Personality Variables, and Serum Lipid Levels in Patients with Anxiety Disorders and Normal Controls
Authors: Goebel Phillip N. , Peter Helmut , Mueller Susanne K. , Hand Iver 
Published: May 2005

Objective: This study evaluates the association between certain personality variables, especially neuroticism, and serum lipid levels in patients suffering from anxiety disorders as opposed to normal control individuals. It addresses the question whether in anxiety disorder patients neuroticism is associated with elevated serum cholesterol and serum LDL cholesterol levels. Method: Thirty (15 male, 15 female) patients with anxiety disorders as defined by DSM-IV and thirty normal matched controls were enrolled in this study. The patients were either admitted for inpatient treatment or referred to the behavioral therapy outpatient clinic at the Department of Psychiatry of the University Hospital Eppendorf (Hamburg/Germany). Control individuals were selected on a voluntary basis and recruited from the authors' colleagues and peers. Matching included Body-Mass-Index, age, and gender. Results: This study showed a significant positive association of neuroticism and serum cholesterol ( r = .29) and serum LDL cholesterol ( r = .35) within the entire cohort of participants. An even higher significant positive relation ( r = .43) could be detected between neuroticism and serum LDL cholesterol within the psychiatric patient group. As far as differences of personality variables between patients and normal controls are concerned, patients seemed to be significantly less satisfied with life, more generally inhibited, more irritable, more stressed, and more emotionally labile than controls. Anxiety disorder patients also tended to complain significantly more often about physical problems. Conclusions: Our data suggest that high scores of neuroticism in anxiety disorders patients may be involved in elevated serum LDL cholesterol levels and, thereby, may lead to an increased risk of coronary heart disease.
Screening for Mental Illness in Primary Care Clinics
Authors: Kahn Linda S. , Halbreich Uriel , Bloom Michael S. , Bidani Rakesh , Rich Ellen , Hershey Charles O. 
Published: May 2005

Objectives: To assess the prevalence of mental disorders in inner city outpatient clinics and to improve the diagnosis of mental illness in primary care. Methods: The Problem Oriented Patient Report (POPR), a patient self-report checklist, was administered to 362 outpatients at two inner-city Buffalo primary care clinics. Patients' completed POPR checklists were evaluated to identify those with potential mental illness diagnoses and were available for the physicians' review during the patients' visits. After the visit, clinical charts were reviewed to determine the frequency of new mental illness diagnoses among continuing and new patients. Results: The screening checklist (POPR) revealed potential mental illnesses in 148/362 outpatients, of which 98% had not been identified by the physicians who had reviewed the patients' completed POPR forms. Only five new diagnoses of mental illnesses were independently made by clinics' physicians—all in follow-up (continuing) patients. Conclusions: The physicians in the two clinics did not diagnose mental illnesses in their patients, even when written checklists of self-reports were available to them. Differences in staff attitudes may influence the data collection process, and patients' as well as physicians' responses. A weakness of this study is that the POPR might generate false positive results. Even if this were the case, the rate of previous diagnoses was still extremely low.
Patients' Influence on Doctors' Behavior: A Case Study of Patient Strategies in Somatization
Authors: Salmon Peter , May Carl R. 
Published: May 2005

Objective: Extensive empirical data and theory describe the inequality of power in relations between doctors and their patients. However, the focus has been on the ways in which doctors control the doctor-patient relationship. This has meant that the extent to which patients influence the consultation, and the ways in which they do this, have been neglected. Methods: In this article, we use a single case to identify and illustrate distinct ways in which patients exert power to determine the outcome of consultations. Conclusion: This analysis leads to a more powerful explanation than is presently available to understand the somatization of psychological needs. According to this, the patient organizes strategies, which include the presentation of emotional and social distress, around a biomedical model. Because of their prior decisions as to their role, doctors permit themselves to be trapped in this model.
Unified Health Services and Family-Focused Primary Care
Authors: Fleck Stephen 
Published: May 2005

Unified health and primary care services must focus on family health and the family as the clinical unit. Understanding the family as the basic social system and assessing its functioning from the standpoints of evolutionary family tasks, family health behavior and family coping capacities are as important as is knowledge of body systems and their functional evaluation, and of social and ecological systems which also can be pathogenic for individuals or families. The concept of psychosomatic medicine must include familio-somatic and somato-familial medicine. Families are involved in the pathogenicity of some diseases and psychiatric disorders, and in the treatment and management of all chronic disease. Coping with dying patients and mourning are also basic family tasks. Only unified clinical services, whether hospitals or health stations, can render realistic care and relate to the many relevant systems in the community, beginning with the patient's family. Clinicians must evaluate these systems as to their wholesome or unwholesome impact on a particular health issue or problem, seeking corrective as well as preventive measures.
Underdevelopment and the Political Economy of Malnutrition and Ill Health
Authors: Chossudovsky Michel 
Published: May 2005

This article applies Marx's abstract subdivision of social consumption to the prevailing patterns of capital accumulation in the Third World. Built-in scarcities in the availability of necessary consumer goods, alongside patterns of overconsumption and social waste by the upper-income groups, are conducive to conditions of mass poverty, malnutrition, and disease that coexist with small pockets of social privilege and affluence. Malnutrition and ill health must be understood and analyzed in relation to the dual and divided structure of social consumption: necessities of life as opposed to luxury and semi-luxury goods. The relationship between capital accumulation, the distribution of money income, and patterns of malnutrition and ill health is analyzed. It is shown that patterns of malnutrition and ill health are socially differentiated, and the core disease pattern in Third World social formations is discussed in relation to the material and social conditions of life which generate ill health and which underlie particular patterns of peripheral capital accumulation. The study focuses on empirical procedures for analyzing the relationship between levels of money income and levels of calorie and protein intake. An appendix outlines a methodology for estimating undernourishment in urban areas from household budget surveys.
Normative Evaluations of Suicide and Death: A Cross-Generational Study
Authors: Boldt Menno 
Published: May 2005

Attitudes toward suicide and death across two intra-familial generations were investigated to gain a better understanding of possible causal factors underlying increasing suicide rates among the young. Cultural and subcultural normative evaluations of suicide and death represent important variables in an individual's decision to choose the suicidal option. Thus, the reported increase in youth suicide rates may be a function of more “accepting” attitudes by today's youth toward suicide and death. The investigation was conducted in a medium-sized Canadian city with a sample of 114 respondents drawn equally from two intra-familial generations. The findings indicate support for the hypothesis that the youthful generation holds more “accepting” attitudes toward suicide and death than does the parental generation. The findings also suggest that the attitudes of the parental generation toward suicide and death have undergone a significant shift from the values that prevailed when they were youths.
How Cheap is a Life?
Authors: Berman Daniel M. 
Published: May 2005

The owners of capital in the United States have successfully transferred most of the costs of industrial casualties onto the working class and the public at large. This has been accomplished by the creation of the privately owned workers' compensation insurance system and the corporate-dominated safety establishment. This “compensation-safety establishment” has been able to take over most of the federal apparatus created by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Nevertheless, workers and unions and their allies have begun to challenge the establishment's hegemony over job health and safety policy for the first time in seventy years.
Does Antidepressant Adherence Have an Effect on Glycemic Control among Diabetic Antidepressant Users?
Authors: Bambauer Kara Z. , Soumerai Stephen B. , Adams Alyce S. , Mah Connie , Zhang Fang , McLaughlin Thomas J. 
Published: May 2005

Objective: To examine the relationship between adherence to antidepressant medications and HbA1c levels among patients with diabetes in a managed care setting. Method: The analysis included measures of HbA1c levels before, during, and after initial antidepressant use among 568 patients with diabetes enrolled in the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care insurance plan from 1991–1995. Adherence was defined as four refills in a six-month period after the first antidepressant prescription. General linear models using SAS PROC MIXED were used to estimate the effects of covariates including antidepressant adherence on HbA1c levels over time, comparing patients who were adherent to antidepressant medications to those patients who were non-adherent to antidepressant medications. Results: Adherence to antidepressant treatment was not significantly associated with HbA1c levels among diabetic patients who are antidepressant users. Younger age, use of insulin and oral medications, and female gender were all significantly associated with HbA1c levels over time. Conclusions: Although we did not observe any association between level of adherence to antidepressant therapy among diabetic patients and levels of glucose control, our results confirm previously established associations between patient characteristics and glycemic control. Further research is needed to disentangle the complex relationship among antidepressant treatment adherence and diabetes outcomes.
An Historical Sketch of the American Population Control Movement
Authors: Mass Bonnie 
Published: May 2005

This paper critically examines the fundamental premises and historical background of the American population control movement and shows how the theories of Thomas Malthus became interwoven with those of the eugenics movement during the first four decades of this century. After World War II, the concern of eugenicists with “race betterment” and with halting multiplication of the “unfit” was replaced by claims that the world was gravely menaced by a “population explosion.” This thematic shift was consistent with the economic and political aims of American financiers and industrialists after 1945, and many of them, as indicated in this paper, became leading figures of the Population Establishment. The author has proceeded with the belief that a rationally planned economy based upon collective ownership of wealth by the working class can furnish goods and services in abundance, while eradicating unemployment, starvation, and oppression. An end to economic exploitation would greatly expand health care facilities and educational opportunities, and demographic problems could be studied and solved within the context of constructing a society that served, rather than pillaged, its members. Today, the goal of intelligent planning of births, at both the family level and the collective level, is blocked by the continuing existence of capitalism. For that reason, exposition of scientific alternatives to present-day world population control plans is preceded by the urgent task of analyzing the complex interplay between those plans and the present system of exploitation and oppression. In her conclusion, the author briefly reappraises the theories of Malthus, which have consistently shaped the decisions made by the Population Establishment. Like Malthus' assertions at the dawn of the industrial era, contemporary neo-Malthusian pronouncements ultimately rest upon assumptions that economic and social irrationalities are invincible and eternal. As the author indicates, neither capitalist society nor plans of action that seek to prolong its existence can offer solutions for today's pressing problems of famine and impoverishment.
Fluoxetine's Effects on Cognitive Performance in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury
Authors: Horsfield Stefanie A. , Rosse Richard B. , Tomasino Vincent , Schwartz Barbara L. , Mastropaolo John , Deutsch Stephen I. 
Published: May 2005

Objective: There are preclinical data showing that fluoxetine stimulated expression of Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) and its specific tyrosine kinase receptor, and caused neuritic elongation and increased dendritic branching density of CA3 hippocampal pyramidal cell neurons in rodents. The latter effect of fluoxetine has been referred to as neuronal remodeling. In view of this preclinical data, we wondered if specific cognitive measures could serve as novel therapeutic targets for fluoxetine in head-injured patients. Theoretically, fluoxetine-induced “neuronal remodeling” might improve cognition, independently of a primary effect on mood. Method: In an open-label pilot investigation, fluoxetine hydrochloride (Prozac; 20–60 mg/day) was administered to a heterogeneous group of five head-injured patients with either no or moderate depression for a period of eight months. These patients had no histories of prior treatment with antidepressant medications. They were administered cognitive and memory tests at baseline and after eight months of treatment on fluoxetine. Results: The preliminary results showed that fluoxetine improved mood, in addition to improving performance on the Trail Making Test Part A, an attentional-motor speed task, and the letter-number sequencing subtest of the WAIS-III, a measure reflecting “working memory.” Conclusions: Although fluoxetine had beneficial effects on some measures of cognition, more work is needed to connect these improvements with neuronal remodeling.
The Common Diseases of Technical Writing
Authors: Douglas George H. 
Published: May 2005

This paper discusses some of the main reasons for the weakness of much technical writing. It suggests that in teaching college-level students in science and engineering curricula the writing teacher should focus mainly on those weak areas, many of which are neglected in high school English courses or in traditional freshman English. If scientific and technical writers can be taught to make a rigorous intellectual analysis of their writing and can be steered away from simplistic and simple-minded formulas they will come to have enough respect for writing as an intellectual discipline that they can be motivated to bring about actual improvement in their written work.
Preventive Medical and Psychosocial Aspects of Family Practice
Authors: Luban-Plozza B. 
Published: May 2005

A patient's symptoms may arise from difficulties in his family life. Relationships between brothers and sisters play a special part in this respect, as do other factors related to personality development. It is one of the special tasks of the general practitioner to be alert to the first signs of emotional disturbance, for he is in an ideal position to intervene before more serious symptoms of illness appear. It is also important to help resolve poor marital relationships, since the constant pressure of daily problems eventually may lead to a neurosis affecting an entire family. Through early psycho-hygienic care (Mental Health Education) a family can be helped to avoid these dangers.
Policy Options: Early Intervention Services for Substance-Exposed Infants
Authors: Miller Suzanne M. 
Published: May 2005

Substance-exposed infants, or babies that have been victims of their mothers' drug use during pregnancy, have reached substantial proportions. Currently, no comprehensive public policy exists to deal with these infants as they enter a society unprepared to respond to an issue increasingly fraught with substantial adverse economic, social, and political ramifications. In order to address the needs of this emerging sub-population, California's governor and state legislature must develop and adopt a concerted interagency policy which outlines: a) uniform criteria for local health care workers, social service agencies, and educators; b) consistent guidelines governing the exchange of information among a range of agencies, including hospitals, schools, and other public and private agencies; and c) increased prevention and early intervention services for these babies and their families. Addressing the needs of these infants requires a bold, comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach from the creators of public policy.