Family violence and the adolescent.

Violence within the family may have a major impact on child and adolescent development. Abused adolescents are more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors with serious consequences. Current adolescent health care is often inadequate in terms of psychosocial screening and anticipatory guidance. Physicians may play a significant role in reducing and preventing adolescent-related violence by increasing their efforts to identify those at risk and helping them with appropriate interventions.

The University of Maryland experience in integrating preventive medicine into the clinical medicine curriculum.

Lifestyle risk factors play a major role in the etiology of premature mortality, morbidity, and disability in the United States. Numerous professional groups as well as the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service have recommended that increased attention be devoted to training medical students and physicians to improve their knowledge and skills in health promotion and disease prevention. Such training is critical for attaining many of the "Healthy People 2000" objectives. For a variety of reasons, however, most medical schools have had difficulty in successfully integrating preventive medicine into their clinical curriculums. This article describes the critical elements that allowed the faculty at the University of Maryland School of Medicine to accomplish this goal through its fourth year clinical preventive medicine course. The strategies employed in this course may serve as a model for other institutions to achieve the integration of preventive medicine into their clinical curriculums.