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When Steve Dawson, PT, was first approached with the idea of teletherapy four years ago, he had to laugh. Providing therapy services over a videophone to a patient in a remote location went against the very grain of his profession.
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As a teenager, Muffy Davis goal in life was to make the Olympics. She consistently was ranked one of the top skiers in the United States. Fifteen years later, Davis retired from competitive skiing with a bronze medal from the 1998 Nagano (Japan) Games and three silvers from the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. A success story, but with a twist: Davis medaled in the Paralympics, not the Olympics, and she did it sitting down as a monoskier.
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They may not grab many headlines, but grievance policies and procedures are, nonetheless, a critical component of a thorough, effective quality improvement effort.
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If a nurse applied for a hard-to-fill night shift at your organization who had left a previous facility under suspicion of murdering several patients, do you think shed be hired? Would it be possible for a technician to intentionally harm patients at your hospital over a period of years, with absolutely no action taken?
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This report described the results of a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of flupirtine maleate (FLU), a triaminopyridine compound in patients with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). The patients with flupirtine showed significantly less deterioration in the dementia tests than the patients treated with placebo.
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Men and women with restless legs syndrome (RLS), aged 18-79 years, were included in this randomized, 12-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled study conducted at 43 centers in 10 European countries, designed to assess the efficacy of ropinirole, a dopamine agonist, in the treatment of RLS. Ropinirole significantly improved IRLSSG score at 12 weeks compared to placebo, with benefit evident even at week 1.
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Non-pharmacologic treatment options for patients of epilepsy include resective epilepsy surgery, vagal nerve stimulation, the ketogenic diet, and experimental protocols. Of these, epilepsy surgery offers the greatest chance of curing the patients epilepsy. To achieve this degree of success, it is critical to localize the epileptogenic zone as accurately as possible. Pataraia et al estimates that MEG provides additional localizing information in 40% of their patients.
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In contrast to arterial thrombo-embolic ischemic stroke, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) is unique in its clinical presentation and treatment algorithm. As reported by Ferro and associates on behalf of the multicenter international ISCVT study, venous stroke, typically treated with heparin, has a good outcome in the vast majority of cases.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced a qualified health claim for reduced risk of coronary heart disease on conventional foods that contain the omega-3 fatty acids eiscosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid.
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Recent studies in intensive care units1 (ICU) have found that critical care specialists often try to base decisions about withdrawal of advanced life support measures based on their perception of the patients wishes and the likelihood of survival in the ICU. But making accurate decisions about a patients wishes in such situations often requires clinicians to communicate effectively with surrogate decision makers members of the patients family or others empowered to make decisions should the person become incapacitated.
