Medical benefits for workmen under social insurance in Japan

Japan was the first Asian country to introduce social insurance measures and she has expanded them during the last few decades. The first social insurance law was passed in 1922 dealing with worker's health insurance in general. It was followed by many schemes of social insurance. National Health Insurance in 1938, Seamen's Insurance in 1939, Employees' Pension Insurance in 1941 and so forth. After World War II the new Constitution was enacted by which the Japanese Government was made responsible for the provision of medical care services for the whole nation. At present approximately the whole population is covered by either one or more of the various social insurance schemes. The main social insurance programs are shown in Figure 1 and Table 1. Most of these insurance schemes are compulsory under Japanese law. Since it would be too difficult and complicated to explain all of these forms of social insurance in detail, we will discuss only about two schemes directly related to medical care services for the workers; namely, the Health Insurance Scheme for non. occupational diseases and disorders (sickness or injury off the job) and Workmen's Compensation Insurance for occupational diseases and disorders (sickness or injury on the job).</p

Valley Views: Instantons, Large Order Behaviors, and Supersymmetry

The elucidation of the properties of the instantons in the topologically trivial sector has been a long-standing puzzle. Here we claim that the properties can be summarized in terms of the geometrical structure in the configuration space, the valley. The evidence for this claim is presented in various ways. The conventional perturbation theory and the non-perturbative calculation are unified, and the ambiguity of the Borel transform of the perturbation series is removed. A `proof' of Bogomolny's ``trick'' is presented, which enables us to go beyond the dilute-gas approximation. The prediction of the large order behavior of the perturbation theory is confirmed by explicit calculations, in some cases to the 478-th order. A new type of supersymmetry is found as a by-product, and our result is shown to be consistent with the non-renormalization theorem. The prediction of the energy levels is confirmed with numerical solutions of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation.Comment: 78 pages, Latex, 22 eps figure

Magnifying endoscope with NBI to predict the depth of invasion in laryngo-pharyngeal cancer.

[Objectives/Hypothesis]To examine if macroscopic classification with a magnifying gastrointestinal endoscope with narrow band imaging (ME-NBI) is useful in predicting pathological depth of tumor invasion in laryngo-pharyngeal cancer. [Study Design]Retrospective study. [Methods]Preoperative endoscopy reports and postoperative pathological reports on 139 laryngo-pharyngeal cancer lesions were retrospectively reviewed, and the association between macroscopic findings in the lesions and the depth of tumor invasion was analyzed statistically. [Results]The ratios of lesions macroscopically classified as 0-I (superficial and protruding), 0-IIa (slightly elevated), 0-IIb (true flat), 0-IIc (slightly depressed), and 0-III (superficial and excavated) in the preoperative endoscopy reports were 3%, 25%, 71%, 1%, and 0%, respectively. Regarding the depth of tumor invasion in the postoperative pathological reports, the ratios of lesions classified as EP (carcinoma in situ), SEP (tumor invades subepithelial layer), and MP (tumor invades muscularis propria) were 73%, 26%, and 1%, respectively. The ratios of subepithelial invasion or muscular invasion in 0-I, 0-IIa, and 0-IIb were 100%, 54%, and 14%, respectively, and showed significant difference (P < 0.0001). Only one of 139 lesions invaded the muscular propria. [Conclusions]This study is the first one to show that macroscopic findings by ME-NBI predict the depth of tumor invasion in superficial laryngo-pharyngeal cancer. It was indicated that there is a little chance of muscular invasion if the lesion is endoscopically diagnosed as 0-I or 0-II. A new T stage classification based on the depth of tumor invasion may be needed in order to adapt the classification to include transoral surgery