Reviews the controversy regarding water fluoridation in the United States during the last 50 years. Discusses the current status; benefits; and health risks including skeletal fluorosis, kidney disease, hypersensitivity, mutagenic effects, birth defects, and cancer. Presents statistics and anecdotal accounts. (CW)

A course to develop medical students' capacity to read medical journal articles critically is described. The course's background, organization, and aims; faculty members' impressions of the course; and students' responses to an evaluation questionnaire are discussed. (MLW)

Music therapy is an established health care and human services profession that is dedicated to the implementation of controlled research studies to determine the underlying mechanisms in music that are responsible for therapeutic change, as well as clinical research to direct and guide the work of the music therapist. This growing body of research…

Provides abstracts of contributed and invited papers presented at a satellite meeting on "Comparative Physiology of Respiration," October 11 and 12, 1981, at Ohio State University, as part of the 32nd Annual Fall Meeting of the American Physiological Society. (CS)

This paper presents epidemiologic evidence on the contributions of physical inactivity and reduced cardiorespiratory fitness to risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). The types and dose of physical activity to reduce risk of CHD and plausible biologic mechanisms for the partial protective effect are reviewed. (Author/SM)

Describes a fully automated approach for indexing documents that is based on associating textwords in a training set of bibliographic citations with the indexing of journals. Discusses the use of journal descriptors (JDs) in the MEDLINE database that could also be used to search other journal articles, monographs, and Web documents. (Author/LRW)

After a continuing effort to improve its grant application process, the department of medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is submitting many more applications and realizing increased funding. The methods and strategy used to make the process more efficient and effective are outlined. (Author/MSE)

"MedLine Search Assistant" is a new interface for MEDLINE searching that improves both search precision and recall by helping the user convert a free text search to a controlled vocabulary-based search in a visual environment. Features of the interface are described, followed by details of the conceptual design and the physical design of…

This report provides an overview of Minnesota's Medical Education and Research Costs (MERC) project, which was undertaken to gather data on the costs of medical education and health care research conducted by hospitals, medical centers, and health maintenance organizations and to develop mechanisms to assess the costs across the health care…

In 1988, Harvard University unveiled plans for Medical Science Partners (MSP), a venture capital fund intended to invest in and commercialize faculty biomedical projects. Critical of what is perceived as a "15 year long trend" wherein Harvard has "forged deeper and more extensive ties with the biomedical industry," the document…

This course syllabus for a continuing education course for health science librarians introduces the MEDLARS system, the MEDLINE database, and the Index Medicus. Designed to enable health science librarians to discriminate between the capabilities of manual searching and online retrieval, an overview is given of the nature and scope of MEDLINE and…

Evidence today indicates that the causes of mental retardation are biological, psychological, and social in origin and that a combination of these causes frequently occur in a single individual. Mental retardation is identified clinically by the presence of several signs that include, but are not limited to, a significant impairment of…

Discusses the rising trend supporting for-profit hospitals. Compares for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals in regards to hospital costs, quality of care, care for the poor, education and research, and the role of the physician. (TW)

Five years of experience using the services of a clinical medical librarian at the Hospital of the Medical College of Pennsylvania are reviewed. There were increases in the use of the librarian for patient-related queries, research, and oral presentations. (Author/MLW)

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, begun in 1969, was developed to allow selected physician clinicians to acquire skills not part of the usual physician's repertoire. The emphasis has included demographic, epidemiologic, economic, social, organizational, humanistic, anthropological, cultural, and ethical problems. (MLW)