The October 7, 2023, terrorist attack in southern Israel forced the evacuation of countless individuals, placing intense demands on health care personnel. Primary care clinicians, who are at the forefront of treating severely traumatized evacuees, are often exposed to secondary trauma, which can affect their mental health and job performance. This study investigated the levels of burnout, well-being, and resilience among health care staff working in primary care clinics in Israel during the aftermath of the attack. 

The Bethesda Family Medicine Clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota, established a bi-monthly Early Pregnancy Dating & Risk Assessment Clinic in September 2022. The clinic introduced an integrated approach, combining point-of-care ultrasound with immediate, multidisciplinary first-trimester care.

The participatory research approach is an important tool of family medicine and primary health care research. However, standard consensus methods like the Delphi and nominal group techniques can be time consuming and may not represent a broad range of opinions. To address these issues, researchers developed an adapted nominal group technique (aNGT) to efficiently build consensus among stakeholders with diverse perspectives.

In wars and conflict, family physicians are frequently called on to serve in expanded roles and are witnesses to the enormous mental and physical suffering of individuals, families, communities, and populations. This special report examines the role of family physicians in the Israel–Hamas conflict and other current wars to inform future practices in family medicine.

A modeling study projected that HPV vaccination programs for adults aged 27 to 45 years could benefit subgroups at higher risk for HPV, but overall, the approach is more costly and less effective than vaccinating younger people.

A pilot study published in JCO Global Oncology, a journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, evaluated a peer support model among patients with breast and gynecological cancers in Vietnam and found that the program can help improve psychological outcomes, including depression, anxiety, stress, and overall physical and mental health quality of life. Cancer patients who did and did not participate in the Stronger Together program experienced these improvements, but the patients who received the peer support improved at a much faster rate than those who did not.

Substance use disorders are notoriously difficult to treat, as it is challenging to intervene in a drugs’ effect on the brain’s reward pathway without interfering with the pathway’s normal function. In a University of Arizona Health Sciences study, researchers identified a drug that reduced the desire for cocaine in a murine model while keeping the brain’s reward pathways for sugar intact.