Re: Status quo—not an option

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 48, No. 6, July August 2006, Page 258 Letters
By: Michael Dettman, MD,

See responses to this letter

In JAW’s editorial (BCMJ 2006;48[1]:4-6) and G.F.O. Tyers’s letter (BCMJ 2006;48[4]:163), the only possibly factual information given was that only Canada and North Korea have “monopolistic government control of the country’s health services” and that “Canada ranks 2nd in the per capita cost of our system but 30th in the WHO’s measure of quality.” This information would suggest that the US is number one in cost (they have three tiers—private, public, and no care) and that there must be almost 160 countries who rank below Canada in “measure of quality” (elaboration might reasonably be requested) but don’t have “government monopoly.”

Although Dr Tyers refers to the “brutal” regime in Cuba, I suspect that Cuba probably rates fairly far down in rankings of brutality among regimes that have two-tier health care or private-only care (e.g., Saudi Arabia or China). The link between for-profit medicine and brutality is rather tenuous at best.

—Michael Dettman, MD
Vancouver

Michael Dettman, MD,. Re: Status quo—not an option. BCMJ, Vol. 48, No. 6, July, August, 2006, Page(s) 258 - Letters.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply