Although the findings have limited generalizability because of low response rates and small sample sizes, the results suggest caution when using e-mail to collect curriculum evaluations from 4th-year medical students.

The results suggest that medical students are interested in learning about alternative medical therapies and they perceive this knowledge will be important to them as physicians. As medical schools undertake various curriculum reforms they should be aware of rising student interest in alternative medical therapies.

BackgroundRecently, some studies suggested that clinical diagnosis of fibromyalgia is inaccurate and does not reflect current definitions. However, this hypothesis has not been tested. We examined whether fibromyalgia was accurately diagnosed in the community.MethodsWe surveyed 3276 primary care patients to determine current fibromyalgia status by criteria (CritFM). We also determined whether the patients had a physician's diagnosis of fibromyalgia (MDFM) and the level of symptom severity as measured by the polysymptomatic distress scale (PSD).ResultsThe prevalence of MDFM and CritFM was 6.1% (95% confidence interval [CI] 5.3%, 6.9%) and 5.5% (95% CI 4.8%, 6.3%), respectively. However, only 32.2% with MDFM met 2016 criteria (CritFM), and only 35.4% with CritFM also had MDFM. The kappa statistic for diagnostic agreement was 0.296 (minimal agreement). The mean PSD score was 12.4 and 18.4 in MDFM and CritFM, respectively. The odds ratio for being a woman compared with being a man was 3.2 for MDFM versus 1.9 for CritFM, P = 0.023. Of the patients with MDFM, 68.3% received specific fibromyalgia pharmacotherapy.ConclusionsThere is little agreement between MDFM and CritFM. Only one‐third of MDFM satisfy fibromyalgia criteria, and only one‐third of patients who meet the criteria have a clinical diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Physician diagnosis is biased and more likely in women. Fibromyalgia treatment is common in MDFM (70.7%). Overall, MDFM appears subjective and unrelated to fibromyalgia criteria. There appears to be no common definition of fibromyalgia in the community.

This study was designed to investigate the formant frequencies of phonated and whispered productions of five test vowels (/i/,/u/, /æ/, /Δ/, and //). Each test vowel was sustained twice in isolation—once phonated, once whispered—by 20 adult female subjects. The phoneme represented by each recorded production was identified independently by 11 listeners. Only those samples identified by 6 or more of the listeners as the vowel intended were retained for a further (acoustic) analysis. An acoustic spectrum of each retained sample was obtained to permit formant measurements. To provide the clearest formant delineation possible in our lab, the phonated samples were analyzed by broadband spectrography and the whispered samples by very narrowband spectrography. This report presents the formant frequencies (F I -F 3 ) of the test productions as measured from the acoustic vowel spectra and the formant-freqneney differences between the pbonated and whispered productions. In general, the results showed a trend for whispered vowel formants to be higher in frequency than phonated vowel formants, but that trend was only strongly evident for F 1 .

In this study, individuals living in the USA who were married and unmarried couples had increased odds of undergoing CRC screening compared to individuals in other marital status groups. Public health interventions are needed to promote CRC screening participation in these other groups.