Shayna Bejaimal

Contributor
3472 Contributions
by Dr. Larry Smith

Why aren’t we listening to the people who recover?

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 A group of women in Toronto who have used drugs

‘Protecting’ Ontario or putting lives in danger?

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.
by Niki Soilis

Canada’s health-care workforce is growing. Teaching capacity is not

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.
by Muhammad Saim

What Alberta gets wrong About Medical Assistance in Dying

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.
by Gleb Tsipursky

Health-care AI should buy back learning time, not just documentation time

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.
by Dr. Ryan Thomas

A doctor-patient perspective: How to combat stigma against rare diseases

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.
by Jai Shah Srividya N Iyer

Canada has invested heavily in youth mental health services. What will it take to make sure they are sustainable and built to scale up?

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.
by Sumeet Talwar

Overcoming the insulin taboo

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.
by Mubariz Maqsood

When health advice becomes political identity

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.
by Gurjit Kaur Toor Valerie Grdisa

Changes to Canada’s Pest Control Products Act are a danger to human and environmental health

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.
by Julia Burnier Cara MacInnis ...

Patient partnership without pay is not partnership: Rethinking how we value lived experience

Beneath the progressive rhetoric extolling the virtues of patient partnership in health research lies an uncomfortable truth: patient partnership is largely unpaid volunteer work.
by Nisha Malhotra

When the numbers match the pain: Measuring what health care misses at the moment of pregnancy loss

When I miscarried in Canada, the clinical encounter that followed felt like I was being handed a form when what I needed was a human being.
by Margaret McGregor

PM’s misnomer of methane gas as a ‘transition fuel’ is distressing

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.
by Lara McLachlan

System reform matters. But MAiD eligibility should not depend on it

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.
by Laura Targownik

Cross-sex hormone use among teens is rising. Should Canadians be concerned?

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.
by Wesley Lodder

What families and caregivers need after cancer caregiving ends

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.
by Linda Miller Don Juzwishin

How to make information accessible across care pathways

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.
by Hanan Hammad

‘Exercise will help any healing process’: Managing the pain of peripheral neuropathy

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.
by Alykhan Abdulla

The dog days of summer are a good time to reflect on our values

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.
by Sylvia Okonofua

Forty years after the Ottawa Charter, why do we still struggle to act on what we know?

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, one of the most influential public health documents ever written. Adopted by delegates from 38 countries at the World Health Organization's First International Conference on Health Promotion, the Charter fundamentally transformed how we think about health by challenging the notion that health is created primarily in hospitals and clinics. Instead, it argued that health is shaped by the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.

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