Category: HEALTH NEWS

If you need doctors to work in the country, you need a selection system that picks people with those values and commitments. University of Exeter/Flickr, CC BYPrime minister Tony Abbott has justified his decision to help fund a new medical school in Perth by noting that Western Australia lacks locally-trained doctors. But how can we know whether the new institution will help Western Australia’s shortfall of 1,000 doctors, many of whom will be needed in rural and remote areas? Three features of a medical school help predict where medical students will eventually work as doctors. They are selection, the curriculum, and the professionalism of the newly-qualified doctors. Selection procedures The aim of selection procedures is to predict and select applicants who will go on and

Should primates such as chimpanzees be given rights normally reserved for humans? phil/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SAHercules and Leo don’t know it, but a decision about their future has made history. In granting an order to show cause on whether Hercules and Leo (who just happen to be chimpanzees) are illegally imprisoned, a Supreme Court judge in Manhattan has kept open the possibility that some nonhuman animals will be granted legal rights under common law. The plaintiffs are currently used for biomedical research at New York’s Stony Brook University. What the lawyers running the case hope to show is that Hercules and Leo shouldn’t be treated as if they were just things or property, but should instead be given the status of persons. Showing that any

Accurate perception of emotional information is crucial for social communication. Matus Laslofi/Flickr, CC BY-SAEvery day we’re confronted with information that stimulates many of our senses at the same time, but we don’t perceive this information in its component parts. Rather, we perceive it as a whole without being conscious of doing so. But people with bipolar disorder struggle with this integration process, and this might make it hard for them to communicate. Think about an explosion: the sight of the fireball might be sufficient to signal that an explosion has occurred, but we will know that it definitely has if we also hear a loud bang, smell smoke and feel heat from the fire. It’s the integration of all these different kinds of sensory information

As technology improves our lives, we seem destined to witness a parallel rise in fear-mongering. Yahoo/Flickr, CC BYTomorrow at TedX Sydney’s Opera House event, high-profile neurosurgeon Charlie Teo will talk about brain cancer. Last Saturday Teo was on Channel 9’s Sunrise program talking about the often malignant cancer that in 2012 killed 1,241 Australians. During the program he said: Unfortunately the jury is still out on whether mobile phones can lead to brain cancer, but studies suggest it’s so. Teo’s name appears on a submission recently sent to the United Nations. If you Google “Charlie Teo and mobile phones” you will see that his public statements on this issue go back years. The submission he signed commences: We are scientists engaged in the study of biological