Health

A northern Alberta town is losing its only family doctor clinic and officials are trying to find solutions before the doors close for good at the end of May.The Wembley Medical Clinic was opened in 2021. It's the only family doctor clinic in the town of Wembley, Alta., about 23 kilometres west of Grande Prairie.A notice of practice closure was posted on social media Feb. 12, explaining that one of the clinic's doctors was moving and the other was unable to take over ownership or practice at the clinic due to a College of Physicians and Surgeons practice permit restriction.According to Wembley town council, the community of roughly 1,400 was without family doctor coverage for about three decades before the clinic opened and now residents face losing it again. "The last two or three weeks, I...

A former chief judge of the Provincial Court of Manitoba will lead an investigation into the procurement practices of Alberta Health and the province's health authority.Christopher McPherson, deputy minister of Jobs, Economy and Trade, announced in a news release Monday afternoon that Raymond E. Wyant, who fully retired as a judge last year, will lead the third-party investigation into health contracts.Wyant's work will begin immediately and he will deliver an interim written report by May 30 and final written report and recommendations by June 30. The final report and recommendations will be posted on the province's website, the news release states.Among the questions Wyant will seek to answer, according to the investigation's terms of reference, is whether Alberta Health and Alberta Heal...

In Nanyuki, a market town just northwest of Mount Kenya, some foreign aid workers and volunteers are worried what U.S. President Donald Trump's dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development will mean for the people there."It's a concern. It's a real issue," said Rex Taylor, co-founder and president of The Small Project, a registered Canadian charity that helps send kids to school in rural Kenya. "In my judgment, it will mean people will die unnecessarily," he told CBC News while on an annual visit to Nanyuki.Kenya has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world, ranking 11th with a prevalence of 3.7 per cent in 2022, according to the World Health Organization. About 1.4 million Kenyans are HIV-positive, according to the non-profit Be in the Know. Amfar, the Foundation for A...

This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.A drug prevention program that began in Montreal has been found to reduce the risk of substance use disorders in teens by offering them tools and strategies to cope with personality traits like impulsivity and anxiety."If a young person is reporting very high levels of these traits, they're more likely to use substances as a way to manage those traits," said Patricia Conrod, founder of the PreVenture program, who is also a psychiatry professor at the Université de Montréal and a scientist at Sainte-Justine hospital in Montreal.A recent study in the American Journal of Psychiatry l...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration took part in a World Health Organization meeting to discuss flu vaccine composition, an official at the UN agency said on Friday.President Donald Trump started the 12-month withdrawal process for the U.S. to leave the WHO on his first day in office in January and has since also overseen a dismantling of U.S. foreign aid that has hit health programs worldwide."We hope that the pause in the work that we're doing with the U.S. is temporary and we hope that we will be able to resume that in full force in the coming weeks," said Maria Van Kerkhove, Director of Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention at WHO."There's information that's coming out from the U.S. Department of Agriculture...

White Coat Black Art26:30What if palliative care was about living better?Palliative care has an image problem.Despite what people think, it's not some kind of "Grim Reaper service," say two of Canada's leading experts in this field of medicine.Ideally, it should focus on improving a patient's quality of life when they are facing a potentially "life-threatening illness," says Dr. Samantha Winemaker who, with researcher Hsien Seow, is on a mission to change the way patients and their physicians think about palliative care."I think people think palliative care is about dying and death, and by accepting it, you're giving up hope," Seow told Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC's White Coat, Black Art. But it's not about giving up on life-extending treatment options, Seow said."Really, when we break ...

Five years after the first reported COVID-19 case in Quebec, the province's curfew remains controversial — more than half the fines are unpaid, legal battles continue and health experts still debate whether the benefits outweighed the costs.Quebec was the only province to prohibit its citizens from leaving their homes at night during the pandemic.Premier François Legault's Coalition Avenir Québec government imposed a nightly curfew on two separate occasions.Was it worth it? Dr. Horacio Arruda, who was the province's director of public health when the curfews were imposed, said it was a necessary move at the time."We needed it because of the indicators of the health-care system, the numbers of people who were getting sick," Arruda said in a recent interview with CBC News."For me, a curfew i...

This First Person column is the experience of Ken Pilon, who lives in Regina. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.It seems like I've been cheating the Grim Reaper my whole life. I was 11 months old when I almost died due to dehydration. At 19, I was in a four-car pile-up on a highway, and then I had cancer at age 45. But no experience reshaped my life or my outlook quite as much as learning that seizures had been hijacking my brain for years, and no one knew  — that was, until I blew through a red light on a trip out-of-town for a comedy show.  That's the last thing I remember before I woke up six hours later in the emergency room, only to hear that I'd had a very serious and potentially lethal grand mal epileptic seizure. I was 51 at the time.Brain se...

WARNING: This story mentions suicide.People who take prohibited psychedelics such as psilocybin or LSD and go to the emergency department for care show a higher risk of death within five years compared with Canada's general population, a new study suggests.Psychedelics are a subclass of hallucinogenic drugs.In the last 10 years, use of drugs such as ketamine, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and MDMA or ecstasy increased in Canada and the United States. In the U.S., the percentage of people reporting they used hallucinogens more than doubled from 3.8 per cent in 2016 to 8.9 per cent in 2021.Use varies widely, from microdosing psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms as part of supervised treatment, to recreational use of the illegal substances.Dr. Daniel Myran, a family physician a...

A Yukon woman is raising the alarm about the cost and difficulty of accessing abortion medication in the territory.Jane Doe says she had to seek an abortion through the emergency room, because the Opal clinic — the territory's only dedicated abortion services provider — is only open one day a week, for four hours. Jane Doe is a pseudonym. CBC is not disclosing her identity for personal safety reasons.That day, she says, she was left waiting, watching other patients come and go, until a female doctor was on shift — even though she hadn't asked to be seen by a female doctor.At the time, Doe was working in a rural community. She'd travelled to Whitehorse on the weekend seeking a medical abortion to end a pregnancy. She says the doctor advised her to go to the Opal Clinic. The receptionist and...