Fostering critical thinking skills: a strategy for enhancing evidence based wellness care

Chiropractic has traditionally regarded itself a wellness profession. As wellness care is postulated to play a central role in the future growth of chiropractic, the development of a wellness ethos acceptable within conventional health care is desirable. This paper describes a unit which prepares chiropractic students for the role of "wellness coaches". Emphasis is placed on providing students with exercises in critical thinking in an effort to prepare them for the challenge of interfacing with an increasingly evidence based health care system. METHODS: This case study describes how health may be promoted and disease prevented through development of personalized wellness programs. As critical thinking is essential to the provision of evidence based wellness care, diverse learning opportunities for developing and refining critical thinking skills have been created. Three of the learning opportunities are an intrinsic component of the subject and, taken together, contributed over 50% of the final grade of the unit. They include a literature review, developing a client wellness contract and peer evaluation. In addition to these 3 compulsory exercises, students were also given an opportunity to develop their critical appraisal skills by undertaking voluntary self- and unit evaluation. Several opportunities for informal self-appraisal were offered in a structured self-study guide, while unit appraisal was undertaken by means of a questionnaire and group discussion at which the Head of School was present. RESULTS: Formal assessment showed all students capable of preparing a wellness program consistent with current thinking in contemporary health care. The small group of students who appraised the unit seemed to value the diversity of learning experiences provided. Opportunities for voluntary unit and self-appraisal were used to varying degrees. Unit evaluation provided useful feedback that led to substantial changes in unit structure. CONCLUSION: Students have demonstrated themselves capable of applying critical thinking in construction of evidence based wellness programs. With respect to unit design, selective use of learning opportunities highlighted the desirability of using obligatory learning opportunities to ensure exposure to core constructs while student feedback was found to provide useful information for enriching unit review. It is hoped inclusion of critical thinking learning opportunities in the undergraduate chiropractic curriculum will contribute to the development of an evidence based ethos in chiropractic care

Uniform Regularity Estimates for the Stokes System in Perforated Domains

We consider the Stokes equations in an unbounded domain $\omega_{\epsilon,\eta}$ perforated by small obstacles, where $\epsilon$ represents the minimal distance between obstacles and $\eta$ is the ratio between the obstacle size and $\epsilon$. We are able to obtain uniform $W^{1,q}$ estimates for solutions to the Stokes equations in such domains with bounding constants depending explicitly on $\epsilon$ and $\eta$

Workbook Section to Accompany A Topical Plan for Conducting Marriage and Parenting Seminars for Couples

Excerpt: Some groups involved in advocating male-female equality go so far as to argue that there are virtually no real biological differences between the sexes other than the reproductive systems. They hold that any substantial differences in sexual, social, or psychological responses are a result of conditioning differences for boys and girls. What is your opinion

A Topical Plan For Conducting Marriage and Parenting Seminars for Couples

Excerpt: To write about marriage and parenting these days seems quite presumptuous. After all, there is a plentiful supply of informative books, pamphlets, periodicals, films, filmstrips and tapes. How do I know this? Personal visits were made to several Christian book stores, public libraries, college and seminary libraries. Then, close examination was made of book catalogs, the Minister\u27s Library (and supplements),! the 1981-82 Current Christian Books, film and filmstrips catalogs, and tape catalogs. Why, then, do a writing project in a field already crammed with good material

Development of space-syaple thermal-control coatings triannual report, jan. 20 - may 20, 1965

Development of stable thermal control coatings with low solar absorptance to infrared emittance rati

The time resolved measurement of ultrashort THz-band electric fields without an ultrashort probe

The time-resolved detection of ultrashort pulsed THz-band electric field temporal profiles without an ultrashort laser probe is demonstrated. A non-linear interaction between a narrow-bandwidth optical probe and the THz pulse transposes the THz spectral intensity and phase information to the optical region, thereby generating an optical pulse whose temporal electric field envelope replicates the temporal profile of the real THz electric field. This optical envelope is characterised via an autocorrelation based FROG measurement, hence revealing the THz temporal profile. The combination of a narrow-bandwidth, long duration, optical probe and self-referenced FROG makes the technique inherently immune to timing jitter between the optical probe and THz pulse, and may find particular application where the THz field is not initially generated via ultrashort laser methods, such as the measurement of longitudinal electron bunch profiles in particle accelerators.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, submitted to AP