OBJECTIVE: The objective of the study was to train asthma patients to improve their ability to discriminate added resistive loads. METHODS: Training consisted of a task in which patients judged the relative difficulty of breathing through two circuits. Difficulty of breathing through the circuits was varied by addition of resistive loads. We assigned 45 patients randomly to one of three conditions: a feedback plus fading condition, a feedback condition, and a control condition. RESULTS: Feedback of accuracy of judgments coupled with fading resulted in reduction of difference threshold. Neither feedback alone nor a control condition in which patients were given experience in making judgments without feedback resulted in threshold change. CONCLUSIONS: Perception training with added resistive loads may help patients to detect an increase in air flow obstruction due to asthma before it becomes severe.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Experimenter expectancy in resistance to respiratory air flow.

OBJECTIVE: The effect of experimenter expectancy was investigated on the resistance to respiratory air flow, measured as total respiratory resistance (Rt) in healthy individuals. METHOD: Each of three naive experimental assistants collected air flow resistance responses from 30 subjects who they had been told were either likely or unlikely to respond to the suggestion of breathing difficulty. RESULTS: The subjects were assigned to the two conditions at random. The subjects who were described to the experimenters as being likely to respond exhibited greater Rt increases to bronchoconstriction suggestion than did the subjects who were described as unlikely to respond. CONCLUSIONS: These findings confirmed the presence of a source of variance that has not been considered previously in suggestion studies.

Adolescent↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Strategic dislocation: reconsidering the role of benchmarking in the development of core competencies.

American healthcare is under tremendous pressure to make difficult choices to stay even with patient and payer expectations. The answer lies not in benchmarking incremental improvement alone but in benchmarking the processes to nurture core competencies.

Clinical Competence↗