A recent article in The Age advised against wearing thongs. It stated that thongs lead to poor joint alignment that damages joints; and damaged joints require surgery. The reality is that wearing thongs is just fine, and most damaged joints do acceptably well without surgery...
Kristie's paper "Decision-Making Preferences and Deprescribing: Perspectives of Older Adults and Companions about their Medicines" was published in the Journal of Gerontology. It found that there are new ways to characterise older people who take multiple medicines and those who are open to "deprescribing".
Long term opioid therapy for non-cancer pain has been much debated because of concerns that the harms may outweigh benefits. What has received less attention is how long term should be defined and whether the label has any value for patients, doctors, or researchers.
Created by an international consortium of experts, this informative and accessible book provides practical guidelines, key learning points, and dynamic, real-world case studies to aid NCD program managers, policy officers and decision-makers in low- and middle-income countries, so that they can assess interventions for the [...]
The primary aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of the Choosing Wisely Australia 5 Questions resource and a video designed to prepare patients for question-asking and participation in shared decision-making on (a) self-efficacy to ask questions and participate in shared decision-making, (b) [...]
Worldwide, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis rates in children and adolescents have been increasing consistently over the past decades, fuelling a debate about the underlying reasons for this trend. While many hypothesise that a substantial number of these additional cases are overdiagnosed, to date [...]
We hear increasingly about the importance of tackling overtreatment, but less often about how overtreatment plays out in the lives of patients and their families. In the article below, Associate Professor Magnolia Cardona introduces us to “Walter”, a fictitious character whose story is typical of many older [...]
A groundbreaking new study is examining how the media globally report on the benefits and harms of tests for healthy people. Dr Mary O’Keeffe, from the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, writes below that the findings are likely to shed new light on [...]
Choosing Wisely is an international effort to give consumers and clinicians guidance on practices, tests and procedures which have little or no value and just should be done either not at all or only in certain circumstances. In theory the strength of Choosing Wisely is [...]
For decades, breast cancer screening has been viewed in a mostly positive light, despite voices from the beginning raising issues related to its harms. Public communications about breast cancer screening have tended to use persuasive techniques aimed at maximizing uptake. False positives were considered the [...]