The author argues that long-term trends point to a future for physician assistants and nurse practitioners as the principal front-line deliverers of primary care, with physicians focusing on managerial duties and specialty care.
Both bans on unhealthful foods and warning label requirements face strong legal opposition from industry and ignite furious public debate about the role and limits of government intervention in American lifestyles.
Doctors and hospitals must stop being bystanders to food-related illness and begin to become role models and educators in the transition to healthful eating habits, just as they did in tobacco cessation.
Until healthful food is widely affordable and accessible to all people, any discussions of how policy might infringe on the right to choose may be misguided.
A new Virginia law governing collaborations between nurse practitioners and doctors leaves unresolved key legal issues in team-based care, including those pertaining to medical malpractice and liability and anticompetitive practices.
Rachel O. Reid, MD, MS and Ateev Mehrotra, MD, MPH
An effective policy regarding retail clinics in a primary care practice should address patients' need for timely and convenient acute care and build capacity for enhanced access to acute care within the primary care clinic itself.
Rather than turning away children whose parents refuse to have them vaccinated, pediatricians should engage the parents in discussion about the importance and safety of vaccination.
The revisions balance a growing understanding of gender identity disorders and societal views with the need to retain conditions that benefit from intervention and the removal of which would hamper patients’ ability to receive medical treatment.