A Note from the Editor
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The Journal notes with sadness the death of one of our Editorial Board members on May 20 of this year. John T. Chissell, MD, a pioneer in alternative medicine, died here in Nashville during the 50th reunion of his Meharry Medical College class. Dr. Chissell and his brother, Dr. H. Garland Chissell, Jr., had a family medicine practice in Baltimore for many years. Dr. Chissell was the first black president of the Maryland Academy of Family Physicians. After retiring from practice in 1987, Dr. Chissell pursued his interest in alternative medicine, establishing the Positive Perceptions Group and writing a book, Pyramids of Power, based on African history and philosophy. He was an adjunct faculty member at Howard University Medical School. He will be sadly missed.
The topics of the articles in the present issue range from sociological theory to consumer debt, but several threads tie groups of them together: Racial disparities in health and health care (Lane et al., Telfair et al., and Washington et al.), the health and health care of incarcerated populations (Rosen et al. and Bell et al.), women's health (Hall et al., Otero-Sabogal et al., Bell et al.), refugee health (Barnes et al.), community health centers (Cashman et al.) and links between the costs of health care and consumer debt (Gurewich et al.) all play a part in making this a particularly rich issue.
Looking to the future, we note that the American Public Health Association's Annual Meeting will be held this year in Washington, DC from November 7-10. Representatives from the Journal as well as the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved (ACU) will be there and we hope to meet many of you in person then.
We also would like to remind our readers of the Call for Papers for the Journal's May 2005 issue (JHCPU 16.2) put out in the last issue. We are planning for the May 2005 issue to include papers fitting the theme of Transdisciplinary Care, one of the hallmarks of ACU, exemplified in part by this issue's ACU Column by Scott Wolpin, DMD and Emanuel Finn, DDS as well as (though not explicitly) by the paper by Telfair et al. As a more general reminder, we repeat the explication of transdisciplinary care from the last issue here.
A transdisciplinary health care team might include participants from such fields as nursing, pharmacy, nutrition, social work, and physical therapy as well as medicine and dentistry. Transdisciplinary care goes beyond interdisciplinary care in that the team of practitioners serving a patient or client is understood (i) to be in close communication with one another, (ii) to have integrated their services with one another's to make care maximally efficient and effective, and (iii) to be open in principle to some cross-disciplinary education and practice. These characteristics of the transdisciplinary team can lead to increased quality of care (especially due to improved communication among the team of caregivers and the integration of services), increased efficiency (by eliminating duplication of paperwork or clinical work by different practitioners), and greater provider satisfaction (through the [End Page v] increase in decision-making capability in patient care for team members). For more description of transdisciplinary care, please visit the ACU website (www.clinicians.org).
To be a candidate for inclusion in the Transdisciplinary Care issue, papers must be received by November 15, 2004, in order to allow time for peer review and production. Whether the paper is written with the term transdisciplinary care explicitly in mind, or simply is written on a subject that in some way fits the description, we will welcome it as a submission. The Information for Authors provided at the end of this and every issue should be followed for these and all other papers submitted to the Journal. The Call for Papers should not in any way be taken as a message that papers on other topics should be withheld; send those, too.
We welcome letters to the editor about papers published in the Journal (and related subjects) as we hope to build a regular place for exchanges between authors and readers in the pages of...
