Awareness, approval and completion of advance directives in older adults in Switzerland.

Background: Advance directives enable people to describe their preferences for medical treatment (living will) and/or to appoint a healthcare proxy who may decide on their behalf should they lose decision-making capacity. Advance directives are potentially important in determining the course of end-of-life care, as deaths are frequently preceded by end-of-life treatment decisions, which often require someone to make decisions on the patient's behalf. Switzerland introduced legally binding advance directives through its new child and adult protection law of 2013.

Emergency department management of body packers and body stuffers.

Trafficking and sale of narcotics frequently involves the intra-abdominal transport of large quantities of drugs, usually cocaine or heroin ("body packing"), or, when there is a risk of being arrested, the oral ingestion of minor quantities of narcotics dedicated for immediate resale ("body stuffing"). This study aimed to describe the characteristics, complications and medical follow through of 132 cases of body packing (n = 36), cases of body stuffing (n = 83) or mixed cases (n = 13), referred by the authorities to our emergency department over the course of 12 years. Analysis of these 132 cases did not reveal any intra-abdominal rupture or leak of the packaging, or any case of acute intoxication.

Handwriting and pre-frailty in the Lausanne cohort 65+ (Lc65+) study.

Background: Frailty is detected by weight loss, weakness, slow walking velocity, reduced physical activity or poor endurance/exhaustion. Handwriting has not been examined in the context of frailty, despite its functional importance.

Objective: Our goal was to examine quantitative handwriting measures in people meeting 0, 1, and 2 or more (2+) frailty criteria.

Injury pattern of the Flash-Ball, a less-lethal weapon used for law enforcement: report of two cases and review of the literature.

Less-lethal weapons are used in law enforcement to neutralize combative individuals and to disperse riot crowds. Local police recently used such an impact weapon, the Flash-Ball, in two different situations. This gun fires large rubber bullets with kinetic energies around 200 J.

Prognosis or "curabo effect?": physician prediction and patient outcome of surgery for low back pain and sciatica.

Study Design: Prospective study with patient and physician questionnaires, clinical records, and imaging.

Objective: To compare physician expectations of surgery for sciatica and patient outcome.

Summary Of Background Data: Physician accuracy in identifying individual patient prognosis is important for therapeutic decisions.