Health practitioners can help reduce health disparities if they consider the implications and affect that patients' geographical location has on their health.
Mary Terrell White, PhD and Katherine L. Cauley, PhD
Students who take international electives must be sensitive to the impact of their presence and to possible risks to patients' safety and their own, and must ask whether their motives for going abroad are overly self-serving.
A bioethicist argues that two journal articles about quality of life-adjusted years research oversimplifies the issue and do not take into consideration people's abilities to adapt to disability and disease.
A health economics professor believes more research is needed on quality of life-adjusted years to explore the way we describe health states, the elicitation of patient values, and how to develop methods for obtaining informed general population preferences.
Elly A. Stolk, MSc and Floortje E. van Nooten, MSc
Two medical technology researchers argue that patients' own valuations of their health states may result in devaluation of interventions that can help them.
A journal author defends his research methodology on quality-adjusted life years, arguing that the measurement is imprecise but necessary in order to determine the impact of clinical interventions and cost-effectiveness of new health care technologies.