Educational intervention reduced family medicine residents’ intention to request diagnostic tests: results of a controlled trial

Objective Dealing with uncertainty is a core competence for physicians. To evaluate the impact of an educational intervention on family medicine residents’ (FMRs’) intention to request diagnostic tests and their attitudes toward uncertainty. Methods Nonrandomized controlled trial. Intervention group (IG) FMRs participated in interactive “dealing with uncertainty” seminars comprising statistical lessons and diagnostic reasoning. Control group (CG) FMRs participated in seminars without in-depth diagnostic lessons. FMRs completed the Dealing with Uncertainty Questionnaire (DUQ), comprising the Diagnostic Action and Diagnostic Reasoning scales. The Physicians’ Reaction to Uncertainty (PRU) questionnaire, comprising 4 scales (Anxiety Due to Uncertainty, Concern about Bad Outcomes, Reluctance to Disclose Uncertainty to Patients, and Reluctance to Disclose Mistakes to Physicians) was also completed. Follow-up was performed 3 months later. Differences were calculated with repeated-measures analysis of variance. Results In total, 107 FMRs of the IG and 102 FMRs of the CG participated at baseline and follow-up. The mean (SD) Diagnostic Action scale score decreased from 24.0 (4.8) to 22.9 (5.1) in the IG and increased in the CG from 23.7 (5.4) to 24.1 (5.4), showing significant group difference (P = 0.006). The Diagnostic Reasoning scale increased significantly (P = 0.025) without a significant group difference (P = 0.616), from 19.2 (2.6) to 19.7 (2.4) in the IG and from 18.1 (3.3) to 18.8 (3.2) in the CG. The PRU scale Anxiety Due to Uncertainty decreased significantly (P = 0.029) without a significant group difference (P = 0.116), from 20.5 (4.8) to 18.5 (5.5) in the IG and from 19.9 (5.5) to 19.0 (6.0) in the CG. Conclusion The structured seminar reduced self-rated diagnostic test requisition. The change in Anxiety Due to Uncertainty and Diagnostic Reasoning might be due to an unspecific accompanying effect of the extra-occupational seminars for residents

Solving unsolved rare neurological diseases-a Solve-RD viewpoint.

Funder: Durch Princess Beatrix Muscle Fund Durch Speeren voor Spieren Muscle FundFunder: University of Tübingen Medical Faculty PATE programFunder: European Reference Network for Rare Neurological Diseases | 739510Funder: European Joint Program on Rare Diseases (EJP-RD COFUND-EJP) | 44140962

On aggression : psychoanalysis as moral politics in post-Nazi Germany

The lecture was delivered on 10 December 2014.The heyday of intellectual and popular preoccupation with psychoanalysis in the West reached from the 1940s to the 1970s, from post-Nazism through Cold War consumerism to the anti-Vietnam War movement and the sexual revolution. In each country the ensuing debates over the truth about how human beings are took unique form. Only in West Germany did debates about the value of psychoanalysis as a system of thought circle so intensely around the question of whether or not aggression was an ineradicable aspect of the human animal and whether or not it might best be conceived as a “drive” comparable in strength and form to libido. This paper analyzes the wholly unexpected consequences set in motion by the publication of ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, not only on the oeuvre of the preeminent West German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, but also on the eventual shape taken by the New Left’s politics and theories of human nature

On aggression : psychoanalysis as moral politics in post-Nazi Germany

Lecture delivered at the European University Institute in Florence on 10 December 2014A video interview with the presenter was recorded on 11 December 2014The heyday of intellectual and popular preoccupation with psychoanalysis in the West reached from the 1940s to the 1970s, from post-Nazism through Cold War consumerism to the anti-Vietnam War movement and the sexual revolution. In each country the ensuing debates over the truth about how human beings are took unique form. Only in West Germany did debates about the value of psychoanalysis as a system of thought circle so intensely around the question of whether or not aggression was an ineradicable aspect of the human animal and whether or not it might best be conceived as a “drive” comparable in strength and form to libido. This paper analyzes the wholly unexpected consequences set in motion by the publication of ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, not only on the oeuvre of the preeminent West German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, but also on the eventual shape taken by the New Left’s politics and theories of human natur

Perversion and Love in Postwar Psychoanalysis Or:Why We Should Reread Robert Stoller

This talk considered the peculiarities of psychoanalysts’ responses to the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s. Topics covered included the highly ideological (mis)uses of the ideal and dream of love in marginalizing nontraditional sexualities – as well as the strategies ultimately used by anti-homophobic psychoanalysts to challenge the dominant norms, with particular attention to the late Robert Stoller’s innovative ideas about sexual excitement. Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published widely in the history of religion in Europe and the U.S., on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and on the histories of gender and sexuality. She completed Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (2011) and is currently at work on a new project on the European and American histories of psychoanalysis, trauma, and desire. She is also the author of Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (2008), Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005), and Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (1996/2007). She is the editor and co-editor of six anthologies, including, most recently, Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (2009) and Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (2007).Dagmar Herzog, Perversion and Love in Postwar Psychoanalysis Or: Why We Should Reread Robert Stoller, lecture, ICI Berlin, 11 March 2015 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e150311