What's in the news: Nov. 4 -- Drugs, Tasers, lawsuits, and more

A round-up of Canadian health news, from coast to coast to coast and beyond, for Tuesday, November 4.

Even Liberal MP Dr Carolyn Bennett is excited about the new Conservative health minister, Leona Aglukkaq. "I love her," Dr Bennett told Christina Spencer of the Toronto Sun. "She's really smart, she knows how government works, she knows how to get things done." [Toronto Sun]

Hospitalizations in British Columbia related to illegal drug use have risen 37% over the last five years, a new study found. Many more people are injured by alcohol and tobacco, but those numbers are waning while drug-related morbidity is becoming more common. [Canadian Press]

Alberta's chief medical examiner, Dr Graeme Dowling, repeated the scientifically questionable assertion that people who die after being shot with a Taser typically are victims of a drug-induced condition called "excited delirium." An autopsy is scheduled for today for Gordon Walker Bowe, who died Saturday in Calgary after perhaps being Tasered. [Edmonton Journal] "Excited delirium" is not a real diagnosis, as Ryan Bergen wrote last year. [National Review of Medicine] A Canadian blog, Truth... Not Tasers, written by the family of a BC man who died after being shot by a Taser, has been chronicling the recent news. [Truth... Not Tasers]

Nurses in Quebec are getting increasingly frustrated with the government's intransigence when it comes to paying what is required for recruitment to "staunch the flow" of RNs leaving the province and to make up for the coming wave of retirements. [Montreal Gazette]

Canadian physicians are at risk of facing more "wrongful birth" lawsuits -- suits against doctors for failing to identify birth defects in utero -- unless they follow carefully a controversial set of clinical practice guidelines issued last year. The guidelines said that all pregnant women should be offered prenatal genetic screening. [Canadian Medical Association Journal] [Canwest News Service] I covered this topic last year when the guidelines were released by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada (SOGC). One of the reviewers of the guidelines expressed some concerns about the neutrality of the counselling offered by family physicians, to whom the responsibility to discuss genetic screening with patients has been falling more and more often in recent years. He told me, "We as medical geneticists are trained to counsel and make sure it is non-directive, but other physicians often do not know how to do it and just tell patients what should be done." A review article from Ottawa, which was still in preliminary draft when I wrote my article, demonstrated that "family physicians are not prepared to counsel patients on test results," one of the authors told me. [National Review of Medicine] The new CMAJ warning should be of concern to doctors, certainly, but it's clear that not all doctors agree with the SOGC's guidelines.

Ontario created a new team of 17 permanent occupational health specialists to monitor healthcare professionals' work safety conditions. [news release]

The University of Toronto came out on top of this year's ranking of the top medical/doctoral research schools in Canada, followed by McGill, University of Alberta, University of British Columbia and McMaster. U of T finished first in every category. [Research Infosource (PDF)]

Two studies in the new issue of Pediatrics strike me as questionable, mostly for their insinuation that there's no need to be too concerned about the difference between correlation and causation. One shows that playing violent video games is associated with increased aggression in kids. [Pediatrics abstract] The other demonstrates that teenage girls who watch lots of "sexy" television shows are more likely to be pregnant within three years. [Pediatrics abstract] [Reuters] The authors of the sexy-TV study admit, "... there is the possibility that we did not account for all factors that may alternatively explain the relationship we uncovered." At some point, doesn't the absence of proof of causation -- in other words, to explain why this should be interesting to us in the least -- make these studies all but useless? One could just as easily write the above papers as "Kids who are going to become more aggressive tend to enjoy violent video games" and "Sexually active teens like thinking about sex." That's a little simplistic, sure -- but you get the idea. One reader, a psychologist from Texas A&M, felt the same way I did about the video game study; he tore it apart in a response to the journal.

Autism may be linked to residency in an area with lots of rainfall, a new study suggested. [CTV News] [Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine abstract] An accompanying commentary tried to explain why the study is likely useless, and why it is nevertheless worthwhile to conduct and publish despite the "possibility (likelihood?) that nonprofessionals are going to misinterpret and misuse it." [Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine abstract]

This week's edition of Grand Rounds, a collection of the best writing from health bloggers, was published today. It includes details about US presidents' health problems over the years, from Jefferson's depression and Taft's obesity to Kennedy's colitis and George H W Bush throwing up on the prime minister of Japan. [Nurse Ratched's Place]

Canada's new dominion carilloneur is a former physician. What's a dominion carilloneur, you ask? That's the person who plays the bells at Parliament Hill. [CBC News] [Ottawa Citizen]

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