Medical care has several important functions other than restoring or maintaining health. These other functions are assessment and certification of health status, prognostication, segregation of the ill to limit communication of illness, and helping to cope with the problems of illness--the caring function. Medical care serving these "paracurative" functions may legitimately be given indepedently, without associated curing or preventive intent of the provider of care. Although such services do not result in benefits to health, such as extension of life or reduction of disability, they do have other valued outcomes, outcomes not measurable as a gain in personal health status. For example, caring activities may result in satisfaction, comfort, or desirable affective states, even while the patient's health status deteriorates during an incurable illness. The physician's approach to patients, the economist's analysis of the benefits of health services, the planner's decisions about health programs, the evaluator's judgments about the quality of care, or the patient's expectations about treatment are strongly influenced by his assumptions about the purpose of medical care or the proper outcome of the process. When the health worker assumes that the only useful outcome is health, he may consider the paracurative services to be ineffective, inefficient, or undesirable. In contrast, when he recognizes and understands the paracurative functions of medical care, he may better perform his function in the medical care system.
Cover-The nearly empty IV bottle symbolizes the short- ages of raw materials and supplies of energy facing the United States. The implications for pla...
Cover-The nearly empty IV bottle symbolizes the short- ages of raw materials and supplies of energy facing the United States. The implications for pla...
Pesticide use was examined by means of a random survey in Allegheny County, Pa., in October and November 1973. The objectives included gaining insight...
Determinations were made of the microhematocrit levels of 50 male and 50 female Spanish Americans and 50 male and 50 female white persons selected at ...
A study was made of the isolation of enteroviruses from 62 cerebrospinal fluids and 141 autopsy specimens with standard fluid monolayer tissue culture...
The relationship between obesity and 18 different disease conditions was examined in a cross-sectional study of 73,000 weight-conscious women (TOPS Cl...
Pulmonary function tests were administered to 1,573 male and female office workers 30 years of age or older during their annual periodic health examin...
PUBLIC HEALTH REPORTS began as a one-page bulletin issued by the Supervising Surgeon-General of the Marine-Hospital Service. The first bulletin, which...
Expecting to find agreement between the geographic distribution of hypertension and renal disease, we developed regional mortality rates for 1950-72 a...
A cancer Surveillance Program was formed in 1970 to provide a mechanism for the early identification of some 22,000 cancer cases that are diagnosed an...
Mailed questionnaires were used to examine the success of PKU (phenylketonuria) screening programs that were operated by departments of health and to ...
BackgroundIndividuals dually eligible for Medicaid and Medicare constitute a small percentage of these program’s populations but account for a dispr...
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