Journal of general internal medicine
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Obesity is rapidly approaching tobacco as the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality. Health care providers have the opportunity to address this through primary prevention strategies. ⋯ Only a very small proportion of healthy-weight adults received primary prevention, which suggests that physicians are missing opportunities to help address the epidemic of adult obesity in the US.
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Colonoscopy is a screening modality for the early detection of colonic polyps and cancers but is underutilized, particularly among minorities. ⋯ Understanding of the range of barriers to colorectal cancer screening can help develop multimodal interventions to increase colonoscopy rates for all patients including low-income Latinos. Interventions including systems improvements and navigator programs could address barriers by assisting patients with scheduling, insurance issues, and transportation and providing interpretation, education, emotional support, and motivational interviewing.
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Academic health care institutions have become interested in understanding and supporting current leaders and preparing leaders for the future. We designed this exploratory study to better understand specific perceived leadership needs of physicians from the perspective of "aspiring" and "established" leaders within our institution. ⋯ Our findings validate others' regarding leadership competencies while extending these findings to the specific context of health care and physicians. Important implications for curricular design include: inclusion of emotional intelligence competencies and reducing formal didactics in favor of programs that are both interactive and problem-based.
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With positive results from diabetes prevention studies, there is interest in convenient ways to incorporate screening for glucose intolerance into routine care and to limit the need for fasting diagnostic tests. ⋯ RPG values should be considered by health care providers to be an opportunistic initial screening test and used to prompt further evaluation of patients at risk of glucose intolerance. Such "serendipitous screening" could help to identify unrecognized diabetes and prediabetes.
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Editorial Comment
The future of health disparities research: 2008 and beyond.