Medicine Canada

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A community for Canadian physicians and medical professionals


🍁 While this community is intended for Canadian discussions, you are free to post about other medical systems. We're all in this together :)



Related Communities

For better links and descriptions, see the pinned post in the Medical Community Hub (!medicine@lemmy.world)


Rules

  1. No requests for professional advice or general medical information. Please do not solicit medical advice or share personal health anecdotes about yourself or others.

  2. No promotions, advertisements, surveys, or petitions.

  3. Link to high-quality, original research whenever possible: Posts which rely on or reference scientific data (e.g. an announcement about a medical breakthrough) should link to the original research in peer-reviewed medical journals or respectable news sources as judged by the moderators. Sensationalized titles, misrepresentation of results, or promotion of blatantly bad science may lead to removal.

  4. Act professionally and decently: /r/medicine is a public forum that represents the medical community and comments should reflect this. Please keep disagreement civil and focused on issues.

  5. Protect patient confidentiality. Please anonymize cases and remove any patient-identifiable information.

  6. No memes or low-effort posts: Memes, image links (including social media screenshots), images of text, or other low-effort posts or comments are not allowed.

These rules have been modelled after /r/medicine. While some rules were modified or skipped as this is a much smaller community, we can revisit the rules as we go. Thank you :)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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There isn't an immediate need for moderators, but I know how difficult it is to find moderators who have experience in the healthcare system.

If you are a physician, nurse, or other healthcare professional, and you would like to be added as a moderator, please send me a message.


Plan for Community

Hi everyone,

This community is now the official replacement for the r/MedicineCanada subreddit, which is now privated. Thank you to the moderator who reached out!

The community on Reddit was still being developed and it was quite small. I expect that to be similar in the early stages on Lemmy as well. While I have thoughts on how this community should be run, I'm also open to changing things up depending on how the community grows.

For now, I'm in agreement with how the other subreddit was being developed. If you would like to read the vision of the subreddit, you can find it here:


I want to help make this Subreddit into a Canadian equivalent for r/Medicine. While there is a lot of overlap, and a lot of Canadian physicians and medical professionals likely use the larger subreddit, it seems useful to have a space to focus discussions on the Canadian medical system.

In recent years, and especially in recent months, there's a clear need for a place where medical professionals in Canada can discuss relevant issues. Given that this can become a divisive topic where there are also often other stakeholders (political, financial, or otherwise) that may want to guide discussion and push certain views, I'm hoping to slowly develop the Subreddit and follow the model of r/Medicine. I hope that by doing so, the actual medical professionals will feel comfortable using this Subreddit for their discussions. I'm not affiliated with the moderators in r/Medicine, although I plan on reaching out to them for tips and supports while I set things up. As this would be a smaller community, even when full of users, I am also planning on communicating with and/or requesting a few other similar Subreddits, so I can redirect traffic accordingly.

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Despite the number of family doctors in Ontario rising over the last 30 years, fewer are practicing traditional, office-based, comprehensive primary care.

It’s a paradox that has bedevilled health-system planners in Canada for years: Why, as the number of family doctors per capita grew, did it become more difficult to find one?

The answer lies in how physicians trained in family medicine practise today, according to a new study based on 30 years of Ontario Health Insurance Plan billing data.


From The Globe and Mail via this RSS feed

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If federal, provincial and territorial governments follow the CDA’s advice, Wegovy would be the first prescription weight loss drug to be covered by public insurance plans.

Provincial governments should pay for the weight-loss drug Wegovy for people who are overweight and have survived a heart attack or stroke, according to a new report from the organization that advises Canadian public drug plans on which new medications to cover.

Canada’s Drug Agency, which released the draft recommendation on Thursday, said taxpayer-funded drug plans should reimburse Wegovy for people with a body mass index of 27 or higher and pre-existing cardiovascular disease because a clinical trial found the once-weekly injection cut their risk of another heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death by 20 per cent.


From The Globe and Mail via this RSS feed

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Canada has seen more cases of the measles this year than at any time since the wildly contagious disease was eliminated here in 1998, a resurgence experts chalk up to falling vaccination rates.

Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, has for years warned of the dangers of the anti-vaccine movement. Dr. Hotez, whose latest book is The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, is in Winnipeg this week. He spoke with health reporter Kelly Grant about measles, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and whether he would ever consider leaving the United States.

Ontario reports 200 new measles cases as province struggles to contain outbreak


From The Globe and Mail via this RSS feed

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The federal election campaign has so far focused on cost of living and the trade war. Health care – an issue that touches the lives of every Canadian – was notably absent from the leaders’ debates, although the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP have made a number of promises on that front in recent days, including to add more family doctors.

Last week, The Globe and Mail hosted a webcast panel – Election 2025: Steps to heal Canada’s health care system –to discuss the current landscape, possible solutions and what to look for when casting your vote on April 28.


From The Globe and Mail via this RSS feed

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Dr. Patrick Veit-Haibach, deputy radiologist-in-chief and nuclear medicine physician at University Health Network, stands next to the door leading to an MRI machine at Toronto General Hospital in Toronto, on March 26.

The last type of chemotherapy that David Easton tried in his five-year fight against prostate cancer left him living a life that was really no life at all.

The retired Ontario autoworker slept 20 hours a day. His little time awake was spent hunched on or over the toilet at his home in Ayton, a small community about two hoursnorthwest of Toronto.


From The Globe and Mail via this RSS feed

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The last type of chemotherapy that David Easton tried in his five-year fight against prostate cancer left him living a life that was really no life at all.

The retired Ontario autoworker slept 20 hours a day. His little time awake was spent hunched on or over the toilet at his home in Ayton, a small community about two hours northwest of Toronto.

He and his wife, Ann Easton, decided in February of 2024 that he would stop chemotherapy, even though he had exhausted all other treatments and very much wanted to live.

Then, about a year later, Mr. Easton was presented with a new option: a radioactive drug delivered by IV that would target his cancer and spare his healthy cells, unlike chemotherapy. “The nurse said that chemo was like being hit with a sledgehammer,” Ms. Easton said, “and this stuff is like being tickled with a feather.”

The only catch was that the 73-year-old would have to limit time with his wife and grandchildren for a few days after the drug was injected into his bloodstream because he would be radioactive.

The radiopharmaceutical that Mr. Easton received at London Health Sciences Centre on March 20 is called Pluvicto, and it is part of a new class of treatments that proponents predict will soon be a fourth pillar of cancer care, alongside surgery, chemotherapy and traditional radiation.

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Good morning. Plenty has changed in the treatment of obesity since experts last published advice on caring for young people with the chronic disease in 2007. More on that below, along with election campaign updates and Katy Perry in outer space.

Today’s headlines

U.S. President Donald Trump muses about tariff relief for automakers and begins the process for semiconductor and pharmaceutical leviesFormer hockey player Chris Simon has been posthumously diagnosed with CTE, and the NHL says there’s no proven link between the twoConservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pledges to use the notwithstanding clause to allow longer sentences for multiple murderers


From The Globe and Mail via this RSS feed

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New medical guideline features 10 recommendations, including one in favour of GLP-1 receptor agonists, the class of drugs that contains semaglutide, better known as the Type 2 diabetes medication Ozempic. Boxes of Ozempic and Wegovy are seen at a pharmacy in London, England, on March 8, 2024.

Doctors caring for young people with obesity should provide nutritionaland exercise advice, but should also consider offering weight-loss drugs and bariatric surgery to teenagers, according to the first new Canadian guideline on the treatment of pediatric obesity in nearly 20 years.

The clinical practice guideline, which provides advice to doctors on how to treat children with obesity, was published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. It features 10 recommendations, including one in favour of GLP-1 receptor agonists, the class of drugs that contains semaglutide, better known as the Type 2 diabetes medication Ozempic.


From The Globe and Mail via this RSS feed

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A Michigan patient died of rabies earlier this year after contracting the virus through an organ transplant, health officials said.

[...]

“There is no threat to the general public. Health officials worked together to ensure that people, including health care providers, who were in contact with the Michigan individual were assessed for possible exposure to rabies,” a spokesperson for the Michigan health department told Global News in a Thursday email.

While organ screening is done for common diseases like HIV, hepatitis B and C and syphilis, they are not routinely tested for rabies before transplantation, according to the CDC.

Since rabies is extremely rare, standard donor screening prioritizes more common infections and conditions that could impact transplant recipients.

“If rabies is not clinically suspected, laboratory testing for rabies is not routinely performed, as it is difficult for doctors to confirm results in the short window of time they have to keep the organs viable for the recipient,” the CDC stated.

What about in Canada?

Testing for disease in organs is performed at the provincial program level following Canadian standards and regulations.

Health Canada’s Guidance on the Safety of Human Cells, Tissues, and Organs for Transplantation Regulations outlines the list of infectious diseases that are tested for in organ donations.

Diseases include HIV, hepatitis B and C, syphilis and toxoplasmosis.

Rabies is not included on the list.

Global News reached out to Health Canada to confirm that rabies is not tested before organ donation, but did not hear back by the time of publication.

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While politicians tout the benefits of reducing interprovincial trade barriers to unlock prosperity amid escalating trade tensions, our most precious health-care resources — fully qualified doctors — remain shackled. Physicians face a maze of regulations when attempting to practise beyond their home province. We must break these chains.

See articles for full details

Authors:

  • Anthony Sanfilippo - professor of Medicine (Cardiology), Queen's University, Ontario
  • Neil Seeman - Senior Fellow, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, and Adjunct Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
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The Alberta government wants to cut more than $400 million in the fees it pays to doctors, according to a confidential memo obtained by The Canadian Press.

The Feb. 18 memo, sent by Alberta Medical Association head Dr. Shelley Duggan to member physicians, says Alberta's health ministry seeks cuts to more than 800 physician billing codes to save $400 million because of budget pressures.

Those codes lay out how much money is paid for specific procedures, sometimes based on the amount of time that a doctor spends with a patient.

"What has become clear in the last few months is that Alberta Health is looking to address its budget shortfalls through the physician services budget," Duggan writes.

"While we hope Alberta Health will reconsider its current approach, we wanted to advise members that it's highly likely the [issue] will proceed to arbitration."

Duggan says the government move breaks an agreement to jointly review the billing changes because the province has not left enough time for a proper evaluation before a March 31 deadline.

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