In the Book of Genesis, fish appeared in the waters on the fifth day of creation, after dry land and water separated. This may be the first reference to a functional, indeed lifesaving, food for humans. In the 19th century, New England ships harvested ...

Male circumcision is probably one of the oldest surgical procedures and is still the most common. Globally, about one man in four is likely to undergo circumcision for various reasons.¹ In the United States, an estimated 80 percent of all newborn boys ...

The volume–outcome hypothesis has created a policymaker's dilemma. In 1979, Luft and colleagues¹ reported in the Journal that the number of procedures performed at a hospital (hospital volume) and mortality rates for many surgical procedures were ...

Primary care practitioners in several states have recently decided to restructure their practices in a way that enables them to see a much smaller number of patients and to spend more time with the ones they do see. Patients enrolled in these practices, ...

To the Editor: The conclusions in the Abstract of the article by Mohr et al. (Nov. 15 issue)¹ overstate the benefits of anticoagulation. They state that the authors “found no difference between aspirin and warfarin in the prevention of recurrent ischemic ...

To the Editor: The study by in 't Veld et al. (Nov. 22 issue)¹ on the prevention of Alzheimer's disease with nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) includes no mortality data. It is entirely possible that patients who received long-term treatment ...

To the Editor: Cohn and Tognoni (Dec. 6 issue)¹ found that the angiotensin-receptor blocker valsartan reduced the combined end point of mortality and morbidity and improved clinical signs and symptoms in patients with heart failure when it was added to ...

To the Editor: Dysphagia occurs in more than 50 percent of patients with Parkinson's disease.¹ Although all the phases of swallowing can be involved, dysphagia due to hyperactivity of the upper esophageal sphincter is the prevalent abnormality.¹

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To the Editor: Dosing errors are among the most common types of medication errors.¹–³ Errors by a factor of 10 (the administration of a dose 10 times or 1/10 as high as appropriate) are of particular concern.⁴ There is a greater chance that an infant or ...

The term “movement disorders” refers to a heterogeneous group of neurologic conditions that share the clinical presentation of involuntary movements and that are presumed to arise from pathophysiologic abnormalities in the basal ganglia or extrapyramidal ...

Few physicians talk about the clinical use of touch, and few medical schools teach it specifically, even though touch is a unique tool for diagnosis and therapeutic applications, as well as a means of communicating a caring attitude. In the poem “Line ...