Major articles with major findings are in this issue. Patient-centered medical care is associated with large decreases in medical care costs! Pelvic examinations can lead to increased symptoms and infections. What should we do? Maternal postpartum depression is related to poorer infant health care quality of life at least until 16 months of age, but cannot be detected until well into the immediate postpartum time period. Using the Colorado Asthma toolkit, practices can significantly improve their management of asthma. Smoking has implications for asthma and its management. Healthy patients often do not understand their insurance, nor why they need it if they are healthy. Younger women are not aware of the potential teratogenic harms of their diabetes and hypertension medicines. Insomnia patients often will accept behavioral treatments. A health literacy screening was not of much practical help in one office. Obesity should be a documented medical problem and is an accepted topic for group medical visits.
Patient-Centered Care Lowers Medical CostsNews flash: patient-centered care is associated with less use of health care services and lower medical expenditures.1 There was a fairly dramatic difference in charges: 50%. When controlling for multiple other factors, more patient-centered care was associated with a 15% (for women patients) and 31% (for men) decrease in cost over the ensuing year; it is interesting to note the sex difference. Impressively, the decreased utilization was diffuse across specialty visits, ancillary testing, and even hospitalization despite the relatively small number of patients (n ϭ 509). The physicians were secondand third-year residents, so perhaps the differences would not be as great if they were attending physicians. Increasing the ability of physicians to provide patient-centered care could decrease costs, providing more dollars to care for those who are currently underserved.
What Are the Negative Effects of a Pelvic Examination?What about urinary symptoms or urinary tract or vaginal infections? We do so many pelvic exams, but mostly we think of emotional consequences, such as women fearing the examination itself or the possible results (diagnosis of sexually transmitted diseases or an abnormal Papanicolaou smear). However, Tiemstra et al 2,3 present new data that suggest that women have more urinary symptoms (prospective and retrospective study), more vaginal symptoms (retrospective study), and are more likely to have actual urinary tract infections (retrospective chart review). The authors' points were reinforced when I (MAB) recently saw 2 patients with urinary tract infections that they blamed on recent pelvic exams. More study needs to be done, but these results are intriguing and suggest we need more work on whether pelvic exams cause problems and how to prevent such negative outcomes.