Injudicious use of inflammatory marker testing for non-specific symptoms is likely to cause more harm than good.

A 45 year old woman with a painful hip comes to see you. She’s normally fit and active, but is now getting pain that is disturbing her walking and waking her at night.

In December 2017 a renewed National Cervical Screening Program was launched in Australia.

Inattentive, impulsive, and hyperactive children have always existed, and it’s difficult to quantify the exact effect of labelling children with a disease name, rather than approaching them ‘the old-fashioned way’, whatever that might be.

What is the evidence for 'medical expulsive therapy' using alpha blockers?

Eating disorders are truly holistic, affecting all biopsychosocial dimensions of health so we need to keep an open mind and our antennae alert in a wide variety of clinical scenarios in General Practice.

We want to DO something for our patients, in part driven by guidelines - get their blood pressure down, improve their HbA1c, improve their life expectancy, but have we forgotten to ask - is this what you really want? And at what point are we doing more harm than good with the treatments we prescribe?

Thankfully, Australian doctors nowadays will rarely see a case measles. Recently however, most states have issued measles outbreak alerts, largely linked to travellers visiting or returning from overseas.

There is a tendency to consider hearing loss a wasted consultation, a referral wasted time. But hearing loss leads to marked isolation, significant reduction in quality of life and has a huge economic impact.

'All screening programmes do harm; some do good as well, and, of these, some do more good than harm at reasonable cost’.