Peer-Assisted History-Taking Groups: A Subjective Assessment of their Impact Upon Medical Students' Interview Skills.

Among the clinical skills needed by all physicians, history taking is one of the most important. The teaching model for peer-assisted history-taking groups investigated in the present study consists of small-group courses in which students practice conducting medical interviews with real patients. The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate the expectations, experiences, and subjective learning progress of participants in peer-assisted history-taking groups.

[Balint group work in Germany - results from a survey of Balint group leaders].

Objectives: Based on a postal survey of Balint group leaders from the year 2004, this study analyses the characteristics of Balint group work as described by Michael Balint (1896-1970)in modern Germany.

Method: A questionnaire was sent to 503 German Balint group leaders, 333 (66.2 %) of whom returned the questionnaire (40.

[From the Gestaltkreis to synergetics: irreversible structural and dynamic functional couplings].

With the present contribution, we attempt to merge the work of several generations of physiology and psychosomatics. The common denominator in an array of observation levels appear in these works as the relationship between irreversible-structural and dynamic-functional couplings and synchronisations. In this context, studies on the level of the common brainstem system appear to be the base for a neuro-bio-psychic self-organisation.

Cardiovascular rhythms in the 0.15-Hz band: common origin of identical phenomena in man and dog in the reticular formation of the brain stem?

Selected examples from experiments in humans and dogs with time series of reticular neurons, respiration, arterial blood pressure and cutaneous forehead blood content fluctuations were analysed using multiscaled time-frequency distribution, post-event-scan and pointwise transinformation. We found in both experiments a "0.15-Hz rhythm" exhibiting periods of spindle waves (increasing and decreasing amplitudes), phase synchronized with respiration at 1:2 and 1:1 integer number ratios.

[The Aachen liaison model].

The encounter between physician and patient is impregnated by contemporary theories of disease. From the point of view of psychotherapeutic medicine, the physician-patient-relationship fuses normative and relationship-oriented thinking. The disease as the object of treatment is being supplemented by the care for the patient as a subject.