I am utmost grateful that the authors have been so generous and have enlightened a curios clinician without research merits. Even if their wordings sometimes appear obfuscating to a novice like me, I am still honored that the authors were willing to make their final comment.

”The study used a generic description of the integrative and conventional care management due to the fact that, in real world settings, patients' health care utilization are rarely limited to only inpatient care, but also concurrently occur in e.g. outpatient, specialist and allied health care provider settings. It may thus be misleading to only refer to one of these domains as the type of care delivered/received over a given period of time. Accordingly, the study outcome was related to index visits rather than periods of care.”

To me this translates to: Since it would be more complicated to match cases and controls so that their use of inpatient care was similar it has not been done, even if our inpatient registry data did contain this information.

But I acknowledge that my interpretation of this carefully scrutinized peer reviewed scientific studies is based on my modest level of research knowledge. We can obviously rest assured that content of the present study is a result of the extensive peer review process each paper goes through before being considered scientifically accurate, relevant, unbiased and accepted for publication.

Best reagards
Mats Reimer MD
Primary Care Pediatrician
Gothenburg
Sweden