Essential Primary Care aims to provide undergraduate students with a comprehensive overview of the clinical problems encountered in primary care. It covers the structure of primary care in the UK, disease prevention and the management of common and important clinical presentations from infancy to old age. Case studies are used in every chapter to illustrate key learning points. The book provides practical advice on how to consult with patients, make sense of their symptoms, explain things to them, and manage their problems. Essential Primary Care: • Is structured in five sections: - The building blocks of primary care: its structure and connection with secondary care, the consultation, the process of making a diagnosis, prescribing, and ethical issues - Health promotion - Common and important presenting problems in roughly chronological order - Cancer - Death and palliative care • Gives advice on how to phrase questions when consulting with patients and how to present information to patients • Provides advice on how management extends to prescribing - often missing from current textbooks • Contains case studies within each chapter which reflect the variety of primary care and provide top tips and advice for consulting with patients • Supported by a companion website at www.wileyessential.com/primarycare featuring MCQs, EMQs, cases and OSCE checklists

This book is a well-referenced history of medicine and medical teaching in Bristol, with material on the development of individual hospitals and other providers of health care throughout the 18th to 21st centuries, and on teaching from the 16th century onwards. More material has been explored and included than previous histories on this topic, largely due to the accessibility of material on the internet, and the willingness of individuals to have their work digitised and made available. This book details the origins and development of the Bristol Medical School, from its beginnings to the present day. Of necessity, there is overlap and inclusion with the development of other educational institutions, some that succeeded (the University of the West of England) and some that did not (the Bristol College).

A practical guide to network meta-analysis with examples and code In the evaluation of healthcare, rigorous methods of quantitative assessment are necessary to establish which interventions are effective and cost-effective. Often a single study will not provide the answers and it is desirable to synthesise evidence from multiple sources, usually randomised controlled trials. This book takes an approach to evidence synthesis that is specifically intended for decision making when there are two or more treatment alternatives being evaluated, and assumes that the purpose of every synthesis is to answer the question "for this pre-identified population of patients, which treatment is 'best'?" A comprehensive, coherent framework for network meta-analysis (mixed treatment comparisons) is adopted and estimated using Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods implemented in the freely available software WinBUGS. Each chapter contains worked examples, exercises, solutions and code that may be adapted by readers to apply to their own analyses. This book can be used as an introduction to evidence synthesis and network meta-analysis, its key properties and policy implications. Examples and advanced methods are also presented for the more experienced reader. Methods used throughout this book can be applied consistently: model critique and checking for evidence consistency are emphasised. Methods are based on technical support documents produced for NICE Decision Support Unit, which support the NICE Methods of Technology Appraisal. Code presented is also the basis for the code used by the ISPOR Task Force on Indirect Comparisons. Includes extensive carefully worked examples, with thorough explanations of how to set out data for use in WinBUGS and how to interpret the output. Network Meta-Analysis for Decision Making will be of interest to decision makers, medical statisticians, health economists, and anyone involved in Health Technology Assessment including the pharmaceutical industry.

The exploding field of epigenetics is challenging the dogma of traditional Mendelian inheritance. Epigenetics plays an important role in shaping who we are and contributes to our prospects of health and disease. While early epigenetic research focused on plant and animal models and in vitro experiments, population-based epidemiologic studies increasingly incorporate epigenetic components. The relevance of epigenetic marks, such as DNA methylation, genomic imprinting, and histone modification for disease causation has yet to be fully explored. This book covers the basic concepts of epigenetic epidemiology, discusses challenges in study design, analysis, and interpretation, epigenetic laboratory techniques, the influence of of age and environmental factors on shaping the epigenome, the role of epigenetics in the developmental origins hypothesis, and provides the state of the art on the epigenetic epidemiology of various health conditions including childhood syndromes, cancer, infectious diseases, inflammation and rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, psychiatric disorders, diabetes, obesity and metabolic disorders, and atherosclerosis. With contributions from: Peter Jones, Jean-Pierre Issa, Gavin Kelsey, Robert Waterland, and many other experts in epigenetics!

Qualitative methods are increasingly used within health economics research, but there is almost no specific material to guide the use of these methods in this context; there is very little that links them to the specific questions that (health) economists ask or that provides guidance on analyzing from an ‘economic’ or ‘resource-focused’ perspective. Whilst the main themes within the book will look very similar to those in many other texts on qualitative research methods, they will: Apply the concepts familiar from qualitative methods to health economics issues in a way that is meaningful in this specific context; Work within an economic analytical approach where the analytic focus is on issues around scarcity and resource allocation; Incorporate examples that are relevant to health economists grappling with resource allocation problems in health care.

Explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.