Short-term and long-term effects of an outpatient rehabilitation program for patients with musculoskeletal disorders

The objective of the study was to investigate whether intensified rehabilitation efforts in primary health care may produce any short-term or long-term reduction of sick leave. The resources at the health care center were fortified with a coordinator from the local insurance office and a specialist group from the hospital. In one primary health care district, a prospective study was performed among 100 patients with a musculoskeletal disorder, having caused at least 21 consecutive days of full-time sick leave (patients). Serving as a control group were individually matched patients from any other health care center in the surrounding municipality of Kristianstad (controls). The number of sick leave days was assessed during year one (short-term) and year three (long-term) after rehabilitation was initiated. The median number of days with sickness benefits for men in the short-term was lower for patients than for controls (34.5 vs 48.5). No difference was found among women. No differences were found in the long-term between patients and controls, either for men or women. We conclude that rehabilitation in primary health care was made more efficient through collaboration with the local insurance office and the specialists, but the effects were not maintained after the collaboration ended.     

Bereavement Research: An Historical Introduction

Early research in the field of bereavement and widowhood was often problem generated and focused on intrapersonal issues such as health consequences. More recent research has emphasized that, to understand the grieving individual, we must also understand the social context in which the bereavement occurred and in which recovery must progress. This introduction traces the historical development of theory, empirical research, and methodology in the field, and places current developments in perspective. The papers in this issue underline the complexity of the bereavement phenomenon, and the need for conceptual perspectives with which to understand the cultural, socioeconomic, interpersonal, and physiological determinants of grief, mourning, and recovery.     

Combinatorics of TCP reordering

We study a combinatorial problem motivated by a receiver-oriented model of TCP traffic from Istrate et al. (2006), that incorporates information on both arrival times, and the dynamics of packet IDs. An important component of this model is a many-to-one mapping FB from sequences of IDs into a sequence of buffer sizes. We show that: i) Given a buffer sequence B, constructing a sequence A of IDs that belongs to the preimage of B is no harder than finding matchings in bipartite graph. ii) Counting the number of sequences A of packet IDs that belong to the preimage of B can be done in linear time in the special case when there exists a constant upper bound on the maximum entry in B. iii) This problem also has a fully polynomial randomized approximation scheme when we have a constant upper bound on the number of repeats in the packet sequences in the preimage. We also provide experimental evidence that the two previous results suffice to efficiently count the number of preimages for buffer sequences observed in real TCP data.     

Moral philosophy has much more to offer

Moral philosophy is a rich tradition that contains many alternative approaches to determining what is right and wrong. A limited account that only considers (hedonistic) utilitarianism and deontology cannot do justice to moral philosophy. It is necessary to also consider the many other general-purpose moral theories that have been proposed, as well as the approaches developed in various branches of applied ethics, such as healthcare ethics, the ethics of technology, and the ethics of risk.