Despite a history steeped in diabetes-related breakthroughs (the discovery of insulin and a track record of performing more insulin-producing cell transplants than any other country), Canada is at risk of losing ground to global peers who are rapidly advancing clinical trials and commercialization at the national level.
If we wanted to understand what it takes to win a Super Bowl, we definitely would be listening to what seven-time winner Tom Brady has to say.
We also would listen to teams that lost. Their experiences matter, too. But it would seem strange to study who wins football championships without spending considerable time talking to the people who actually won them.
To understand cancer survivorship, we listen not only to oncologists and researchers but also to people who have survived cancer and gone on to live healthy, rewarding and meaningful lives.
So why is addiction recovery different?
By now, just about everyone has seen or heard Doug Ford’s ad campaign claiming that the current premier seeks to Protect Ontario. It’s crystal clear that Ford’s version of “safety” only applies to a fraction of his constituents.
Lying in a cold operating room surrounded by the health-care team, I watched trainees gather around to observe my surgery. Their presence was anticipated, given the central role hospitals play in health‑professions education. Yet as I lay there, vulnerable and exposed, I felt less like a person and more like a teaching case.
Few issues in medicine are as ethically complex and important as medical assistance in dying, (MAiD). Reasonable people can disagree about where eligibility should begin and end, how at-risk individuals should be protected, and what safeguards are necessary before an irreversible decision is made. But Alberta's Bill 18, the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act, moves the conversation in the wrong direction.
Canadian health care does not need another technology that simply changes the shape of administrative burden. It needs technology that gives clinicians and health-system professionals time back for professional development and clinical work.
In medical school, students routinely examine one another to practice clinical skills before applying them in real-world settings. So, when a classmate noticed small lumps in my neck, I made sure to get it checked, thinking there must be something wrong. However, the examination and imaging did not reveal anything concerning and I moved on.
In the midst of polycrises such as the COVID pandemic, climate change, financial precarity and the rise of artificial intelligence, there has been growing global momentum for early intervention in the mental health of young people.
The insulin pen had been sitting on his kitchen table for months. The 46‑year‑old man, a retired Sri Lanka born chef living in the Toronto area, had survived oral cancer, pancreatitis and a lifetime of hard work. But nothing frightened him more than the small plastic pen meant to save his life. On a June morning, during a routine check after his jaw surgery, he finally confessed his fears.
For years, we talked about health misinformation as if it were mainly a knowledge problem: patients encountering false claims online, doctors correcting them and the better information winning.
Bill C-30 represents a paradox: its immediate and long-term health and economic consequences are severe and far-reaching, and undermine the logic used to justify it.
Beneath the progressive rhetoric extolling the virtues of patient partnership in health research lies an uncomfortable truth: patient partnership is largely unpaid volunteer work.
As a physician advocating for planetary health and environmental health researcher, I find Prime Minister Mark Carney’s persistence in referring to liquified natural gas (LNG) as a “transition fuel” deeply distressing. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
In June, Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on MAiD recommended that Canada indefinitely exclude people whose sole underlying condition is mental illness. Some disability organizations frame this as necessary to preserve the exclusion so we can keep pressure on governments to improve supports or permit eligibility and risk that pressure disappearing.
Providing gender-affirming medical care to adolescents has become one of the most heavily debated medical topics in the public sphere.
Medical interventions once widely presented by most major medical groups as unequivocally beneficial and even lifesaving for young people with gender dysphoria have come under sustained scrutiny as emerging evidence has called the certainty of these claims into question and trans issues have become more politically polarizing and salient.
On July 31, 2020, my wife, Emily, took her last breath after a long battle with cancer.
In that moment, the role that had consumed my life for years came to an abrupt end.
A recent article in Healthy Debate rightly drew attention to the fragmentation of Canada’s health information environment and to the burden this can place on patients, clinicians, public health and system learning. However, the issue should not be framed as if success requires a single, seamless pan-Canadian record available in every setting.
Peripheral neuropathy, the chronic nerve illness caused by conditions such as diabetes, cancer, infections and autoimmune diseases, was thought to be completely irreversible. But recent case studies suggest early onset of neuropathy has a chance to be reversed using something everyone can afford: exercise.
The “dog days of summer” offer Canadians time to disconnect from a harried life and an opportunity to reflect before reacting. Parliament is quiet, our attachment to the frenetic news cycle is unshackled and, for a few precious weeks, the yoyoing of outrage and frustration becomes a distant call of the lake loon.