Medcast news and blog

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?

Are you having difficulty getting your head around the use of technology in mental health care? The idea that computer programs might interact with humans in a humanlike way has been around for decades but ideas about implementation are getting more and more sophisticated.

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’.

I was called in by my Head of Learning and Teaching to discuss my ‘workload’ recently. My first thought was “oh no, they will add more to my workload as they’ve discovered that I’ve been working under my contracted hours”.

Imagine you are seeing Sue with major depression. You have referred her for talking therapy, tried a SSRI then an SNRI and she is still no better. What next? Is it worth adding in mirtazapine?

Although evidence-based medicine has undoubtedly been a force for good and has transformed clinical practice for the better, it has also been responsible for a subtle change in power dynamics when it comes to clinical policymaking.

A friend of mine came to have coffee with me recently. She was very anxious and upset about her husband’s upcoming prostatectomy. He had developed a fairly aggressive cancer that needed immediate action.