Pediatric patients with sickle cell disease: use of complementary and alternative therapies.

Objective: Despite clinical advances, sickle cell disease (SCD) remains a difficult, chronic medical condition for many children and youth. Additional treatment strategies, including complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies, would be welcome to enhance the clinical care of SCD patients. This study's objective was to identify CAM therapies that are currently used by families for children with SCD, and to investigate SCD families' interest in CAM.

Computer-based documentation: effect on parent and physician satisfaction during a pediatric health maintenance encounter.

Objective: To investigate the impact of a computer-based documentation (CBD) tool on parent and physician satisfaction with a pediatric health maintenance encounter.

Design: The project used a preintervention and postintervention design. The preintervention group visits used paper-based forms for data entry, whereas the postintervention visits used CBD.

Parent-pediatrician communication about complementary and alternative medicine use for children.

Anonymous self-report surveys of a convenience sample of caregivers accompanying children to the pediatrician for acute or well visits at 4 pediatric practices in the Washington, DC area from July through November 1998 were evaluated. Three hundred seventy-eight (85%) of 443 caregivers approached participated. The 348 surveys completed by parents (92%) were analyzed.

Longitudinal care improves disclosure of psychosocial information.

Background: While longitudinal primary care is thought to promote patient rapport and trust, it is not known if longitudinality helps overcome barriers to communication that may occur when the patient and physician are of different ethnicities and/or sexes.

Objective: To examine if longitudinal pediatric care ameliorates disparities in parent disclosure of psychosocial information associated with ethnic and gender discordance between parent and physician.

Design: Longitudinal, observational study of parent-physician interaction at early visits and over the course of 1 year.

How delinquent youths acquire guns: initial versus most recent gun acquisitions.

Background: Access to firearms among delinquent youths poses significant risks to community safety. The purpose of the study was to describe how a group of criminally involved youths obtained guns.

Methods: Youths were randomly selected from a juvenile justice facility to participate in a semistructured, anonymous interview.