Is committment to one's doctor important?
Patients, if trust their doctors, are committed to them and this affects clinical outcomes. One thousand patients have been interviewed in family practice waiting rooms. 
Moving from the previous observation that patients show higher satisfaction scores if they usually visit the same doctor, a group of US physicians and business experts has investigated whether strength of patients’ commitment to their family physician was associated with adherence to prescriptions and healthy eating.
The report has been published in the January/February issue of the Annals of Family Medicine 1.
Medicine as an art
Everyday medical practice, as takes place in the context of inter-personal relationships, has always kept an extra-scientific dimension. The physician’s way of doing is concurrently influenced on one side by this humanistic component and on the other side by the clinical reasoning, grounded on objective, statistically analysed observations and on their biochemical and pathophysiological interpretation. However, it is common opinion that in the last decades the former of these two aspects of medicine is quite vanishing, pushed away by the scientific and technical progress and by socio-economic constraints.
Don't neglect mental health
The issue no. 9590 of The Lancet (September 9, 2007) contains several articles about mental health. As usual for the journal, a global perspective is given and social aspects of the problem are particularly addressed. S. Moussavi et al (1), analysing data from the World Health Survey of WHO, aimed at comparing the impairment in health state induced by depression with that due to four common chronic diseases: angina, arthritis, asthma, and diabetes.
