Talking Points
Pre-diabetes: A boon for pharma but is it good medicine?
March 20th, 2019 Labelling people as having pre-diabetes could do more harm than good, experts have said, as research reveals that even some of those involved in coining the term now reject it. The Guardian reports that the American Diabetes Association (ADA)...
The rights of foreign nationals in accessing SA healthcare
March 13th, 2019 Directives recently issued by the national Health Department and Gauteng Health requiring foreign nationals to pay in full for healthcare at public facilities weren’t only a threat to public health, they may have been downright illegal, reports...
Academic medicine must step up with LGBTQ patients
March 13th, 2019 Medical schools have failed to include in their standard medical curricula training on hormone therapy, gender-affirming surgeries, or even the basics of sexual orientation and gender identity, argues an Association of American Medical Colleagues...
Psychotherapist talks about suppression of his ‘politically incorrect' research
March 6th, 2019 Psychotherapist James Caspian attempted to undertake a research project into ‘detransitioning’, where those who have transitioned to another gender come to regret their decision and try to reverse the process. Bath Spa University rejected his...
Vaccination advocates face vicious campaigns of online abuse
March 6th, 2019 When the naturopath Elias Kass testified before a Washington state senate committee on 20 February with a baby on his chest and a pacifier in his hand, he knew that his arguments would be unpopular with the anti-vaccine activists in the room. The...
The war over faecal microbiota transplants
March 6th, 2019 Will corporate greed get in the way of patient access to non-profit stool for faecal transplants? The New York Times reports that there are millions of dollars at stakes, thousands of lives in the balance. The battle, pitting drug companies...
Eskom crisis may be dwarfed by the looming NHI disaster
February 27th, 2019 As much as the country is currently focused on the crisis in Eskom, the nation seems to have lost sight of the looming National Health Insurance (NHI) fund, which will be twice the size of the failing power utility in financial terms, writes Johann...
The Lancet Commission on Obesity recommendations 'deeply problematic'
February 27th, 2019 The Lancet Commission on Obesity, three years in the making, has just been released. It is an infringement of personal freedoms and based on the misconception that government knows what's best for us, writes Ivo Vegter, columnist and author in...
Ticking boxes instead of actually doing something to save SA's ailing health system
February 27th, 2019 This is an illness we have as a country: we convene summits, appoint task teams, create war rooms, and hold press conferences, but very rarely does it make a difference. Anso Thom, editor of Spotlight, writes in the Daily Maverick, on...
FDA warns against the vampire fad
February 20th, 2019 Unscrupulous parties are touting blood plasma infusion from young donors to fight ageing or serious illnesses. This week the US Food and Drug Administration warned against the procedure. Many older people are infusing young people's plasma into...
Medical journals slated for ethics failure on Chinese organ donor articles
February 13th, 2019 A world-first study has called for the mass retraction of more than 400 scientific papers on organ transplantation, amid fears the organs were obtained unethically from Chinese prisoners. The Guardian reports the Australian-led study exposes a mass...
Mapping gender inequality in the scientific community
February 13th, 2019 A special issue of The Lancet reports that gender inequality in the scientific community starts right at the beginning of the scientific process – when researchers petition for cash from funding bodies. But gender anonymity in applications...
Delay in release of private health sector report 'bad news'
February 6th, 2019 The release of a final report about the state of competition in South Africa’s private health sector has been delayed again, writes Wezile Chitha, assistant dean of strategic affairs in the faculty of health sciences at the University of the...
'Urgent need' for antiretroviral pregnancy registry in SA
February 6th, 2019 South Africa has an "appalling record" on pregnancy registries but one is urgently needed to answer questions about the new antiretroviral dolutegravir, which is being rolled out in the public sector later this year, writes Dr Tom Boyles, senior...
Gene therapy: A game changer for those with sickle-cell disease
January 30th, 2019 With advances in gene therapy, scientists have begun to talk of a cure for sickle-cell disease, an inherited condition that mainly afflicts people of African descent, reports The New York Times. Scientists have long known what causes sickle-cell...