Canadian medical news update: Money, sex drugs, chilly Filipino nurses, gender bias and more

Here's a sampling of some of what we here at Canadian Medicine are talking about lately.

• Some clinical trial participants in Prince Edward Island have been left out in the cold -- literally. Halifax dermatologist Barrie Ross tested a rheumatoid arthritis drug called anakinra to treat the rare disease familial cold autoinflammatory syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes patients to "feel like they're freezing from the inside out," reports the CBC. But now that the trial is over -- a big success, by the way -- the afflicted patients can't afford the $15,000-per-year medication. The government is "looking into the issue."

• A recreational drug that had previously been mostly unknown is now becoming more popular in Canada, alluringly named "foxy methoxy." The appropriately named drug, a hallucinogen in the same family as magic mushrooms, is said to make one feel foxy -- or, as Canwest News describes it, it "can draw its users into sexual temptation." Want to learn more? I've found two very different explanations of the drug for your perusal: one, a good site on foxy from the University of Maryland's Center for Substance Abuse Research (some more slang terms for the drug: "Trash, Dip foxy, Roxy, Yum Yum, Muffy, Excite-bike, Five9"); the other, several definitions of foxy methoxy provided by Urban Dictionary (including a sample usage of the term that I defy anyone to explain to me: "Three schwags of fox to my nug grill! I blaze three foxes to my grill and nugged a dome past the schwag face!" Huh?)

• Nine days of recruiting by Saskatchewan officials have netted the province 297 Filipino nurses. One concern for the recruiters was how to assuage the nurses' fears about the weather in Saskatchewan. "They shuddered at the temperatures but were excited," one official told the StarPhoenix. "They thought the images of frost on the trees and the frozen river were beautiful." At a time when the brain drain and health human resources poaching are major concerns, the province wanted to ensure it was recruiting ethically, so a policy was developed to recruit no more than 10 nurses from any one hospital in the Philippines. ("When you're going into another country, it is imperative to act ethically and ensure you don't leave their system in chaos.") So spreading the brain drain more thinly is somehow more ethical than decimating just one or two hospitals? According to the Saskatchewan officials, their "consideration" was "much appreciated."

• Do doctors prefer men to women? It seems so, at least when it comes to recommending knee replacement surgery, according to a new study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. "Physicians are prone to the same automatic, unconscious and ubiquitous social stereotyping that affect all of our behaviour," write the team of Toronto researchers. How far we've come... Particularly notable about this study, besides its dispiriting results, is its unprecedented methodology. For the first time ever, researchers sent real osteoarthritis patients as part of "Operation Knee" to visit unsuspecting physicians to measure gender bias, instead of using actors, according to Canwest News.

• A woman whose 18kg tumour wasn't being treated quickly in Ontario decided to get treatment in Michigan, but the provincial government has refused to refund her $60,000 bill. "It's ludicrous," the woman told the Globe and Mail. "Where's the judgment and the integrity in all of this?... I'm disappointed with the bureaucracy of it all."

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