What's in the news: Dec. 8 -- Vancouver's invisible Asian drug addicts

A round-up of Canadian health news, from coast to coast to coast and beyond, for Monday, December 8.

Reporter Kate Allen described the invisible population of drug-addicted Asians in Vancouver. "They're not visible in mainstream services, but it's a huge problem. That's even understating it," Tomiye Ishida, an outreach worker and recovering addict, told Ms Allen. "There were some people [the ASIA drug outreach team] connected with on the street who hadn't talked to anybody in weeks because they didn't know anybody who spoke their language. You probably can't even imagine how limited their knowledge of resources is." UBC's Thomas Kerr, one of Canada's top addictions researchers, said, "The reality is, we don't have enough treatment for anybody, let alone making ethnicity-specific treatment, which is unfortunate. There is certainly a need for it, but we don't have it." [Vancouver Sun]

Patients are more comfortable and less frightened by medical conditions when doctors call them by their conversational name (excessive sweatiness, for instance) rather than their medical name (hyperhidrosis), a new study from McMaster University showed. "A simple switch in terminology can result in a real bias in perception," said grad student Meredith Young, who co-authored the study, which appears online today in the journal Public Library of Science ONE. "These findings have implications for many areas, including medical communication with the public, corporate advertising and public policy." [news release] [PLoS ONE]

Everyone should be given access to stimulants and other drugs that enhance cognition, said a highly controversial commentary published in Nature that compares drug use for healthy adults to "exercise, nutrition and sleep, as well as instruction and reading" as a reasonable and viable method of improving one's intellectual ability. [Nature] "I would be the first in line if safe and effective drugs were developed that trumped caffeine," one of the authors told the Associated Press. But the Minnesota Center for Bioethics's Leigh Turner commented, "It's a nice puff piece for selling medications for people who don't have an illness of any kind." [Associated Press] Readers are discussing the article [Nature Network], and the Knight Science Journalism Tracker collected a handful of stories on the subject. [KSJ Tracker] Medical ethics reporter Stuart Laidlaw also covered the Nature paper. [Toronto Star]

The city of Windsor, Ontario, has managed to recruit several dozen doctors from the United States. The doctors have been enticed largely by the marked difference in the amount of insurance paperwork required in Canada's single-payer system. [Canwest News Service]

New studies are investigating whether amphetamines might help cure cocaine addicts. [Time]

Dr Dave Williams, the Canadian physician, researcher and astronaut, will deliver the first of an 11-part series of lectures on medicine in extreme environments. Dr Williams will speak tomorrow night at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. [news release]

Dr David Greenberg, the star of the television show Doctor in the House, analyzed the hit TV shows House and Grey's Anatomy with Edmonton Sun reporter Bill Harris. [Edmonton Sun]

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