30 year-old woman from Quebec chose euthanasia after suffering for years. At the end she weighed 59 lbs and could not get supplemental feeding from the health care system. Very similar case to others we have seen recently, but chose the option to end it on her own term instead of starving to death. She died on May 17. Said to be from Lyme disease. I don't know what gets MDs foaming at the mouth about, let's call it Long Lyme, more than anything, and I think it's obvious that the problem isn't with a specific pathogen but rather with an immune response. But this is unacceptable however it's called or framed at. This is social murder. Woman with ‘unmanageable’ pain from Lyme disease chooses to die. She wasn’t always believed https://globalnews.ca/news/10529000/lyme-disease-assisted-death-canada/
Canadians Without Life Threatening Disease Are Being Encouraged to Consider Suicide: Opinion Green says patients who can now access MAID include those with lifelong chronic pain or post-viral illness such as chronic Lyme disease or chronic fatigue syndrome (now called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis). “They would rather die than live like this,” said Green of these patients asking for MAID. LINK
Sometimes questions just answer themselves: Mental health services aren't an option in most of those cases. They could be scarce, they could be plentiful, and it wouldn't change anything, because they have nothing to do with the problem. Solutions have to at least relate to the problem, to be effective they have to directly target it. Not here, but this kind of thinking is exactly why there aren't any real options, and people pushed into despair take desperate measures. If I was offered such services, I wouldn't even know what to do. That is if I accepted, which I wouldn't. Even if it was available on my own time from home. This is not what I need. It has nothing to do with my problems, offers no solution to them. I need this as much as I need to learn to tame lions. I already did it once, early when I first got ill, and I didn't even know what to talk about. I had an easy life and was, and still am, as well-adjusted as a person can be. So the simple reality of why there aren't options here is that it's all by choice, that the medical profession would rather cling to junk fantasies about magical powers of the mind than do the damn work that needs to be done, even if it causes people to kill themselves, to suffer needlessly, and to die early even if they don't do it themselves. Options are possible, they're even relatively easy, but it goes against how medicine has worked for a long time, and traditions overrule the law and human rights most of the time here. But damn is this complicated, because there are legitimate reasons for euthanasia. My parents are getting pretty old and I've lost count of how many people they know who went through it, rather than suffer agonizing slow deaths from cancer or degenerative diseases. I know for certain that my mother will go through this, largely because of how she saw her own mother, and my father's mother, suffer and languish, even after they wanted to end it. Really I don't see much of a difference between euthanizing disabled people who could be helped, and just leaving us to suffer needlessly entirely out of choice, in the service of a bullshit ideology. They're just as vile, the methods don't really matter, the real scandal here is the negligence, the denial and inability to do better out of sheer stubbornness and ineptitude.
Environmental sensitivities and scent-free policies: A guide for federally regulated employers and service providers (2024) - Canadian Human Rights Commission https://www.chrc-ccdp.gc.ca/en/reso...nmental-sensitivities-and-scent-free-policies
New CAN-PCC @CochraneCanada recommendation out yesterday, including of note Metformin for the treatment of COVID-19 infection in people with Post Covid Condition. It's potentially practice changing. Pharmacological and non-pharmacological clinical interventions for post-COVID-19 condition Topic: Clinical interventions for PCC In adults with post COVID-19 condition who have a new COVID-19 infection, the CAN-PCC Collaborative suggests using metformin (conditional recommendation; very low certainty in the evidence). Remarks: The regimen of metformin that was used in the two largest RCTs in non-hospitalized adults with acute COVID-19 was 750 mg twice daily for 10 days in one study, while the other study used a gradualy increased dose (day 1: 500 mg once, day 2-5: 500 mg twice daily, day 6-14: 500 mg in the morning and 1000 mg in the evening). This recommendation specifically applies to adults and not to children and adolescents. LINK
Anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and Powassan virus are all emerging health threats alongside Lyme disease MaryAnn Harris spent three years in hospital before her death in June 2024. The cause? A tick bite that infected the Ottawa resident with a little-known pathogen called Powassan virus, one of several emerging tick-spread illnesses that medical experts say could be striking more Canadians in the decades ahead. LINK
Don't think I've seen it yet: https://www.reclaimtrial.ca/. The RECLAIM trial: Recovering from COVID-19 Lingering Symptoms Adaptive Integrative Medicine. They have a few locations across the country. Doesn't inspire confidence, to be honest. Trial info: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05513560. Will test Ibudilast, an anti-inflammatory drug that acts as a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, and Pentoxifylline, a xanthine derivative used in the management of peripheral vascular disease. Primary outcome is SF-36. Could be worse, should be better.
Last year, the regional university hospital (CHUM in Montreal) opened a clinic for what they call complex illnesses, specifically naming ME/CFS. Today I got a call from my GP saying that my referral was rejected, they only take Long Covid. I don't think it says much about how good such a clinic might be if they reject what is pretty much the main issue found in LC. Ah well. My GP seemed a bit skeptical that a reference to cardiology for POTS would be deemed controversial, said that it's not the 1970s anymore. Ha! Ah well indeed...
It says so on their own website. https://www.chumontreal.qc.ca/repertoire/centre-dexpertise-maladies-complexes What is a complex disease? Complex diseases are diseases whose etiology is multifactorial. Symptoms vary and are often multisystemic. They can be debilitating and require consultations with multiple medical specialists and professionals. Often, scientific uncertainties persist and more conventional treatment approaches do not provide the expected results. The CHUM's Centre of Expertise for Complex Diseases treats patients with long-term COVID-19 as well as those with symptoms of myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess they prefer LC patients because they have better chances of recovering on their own.
Results of a brain scanning study from a Canadian team is out: A Multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study on Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Feasibility and Clinical Correlation, 2024, Kaur Mentions a patient registry.
Quebec doctors are paid less for medical procedures on women: study The gaps range from 33 to 218 per cent, and the association of Quebec OB-GYNs says there is no medical reason to justify the difference. “I think Quebecers have the right to know that the value given to care given to a woman is lower than that given to care given to a man,” she said. “That’s the message we’re sending. It’s the basic principle of equity, of women’s health care. That is our biggest message.” LINK
Interesting interview on a public channel funded by the Ontario government. It features one of the goto pandemic minimizer (Bogoch), along with a professor of immunology and a professor of psychiatry, who makes many good points about how ignoring the cumulative impacts of COVID is foolish. Being a professor of psychiatry it's possible that he mixes a bit of mental health within LC, but the whole thing about arguing that the cumulative risk of LC must go down with time, despite being an addition of positive numbers, has been one of the most absurd excuses offered so far. Not with a foreverdemic. I don't think I can link directly to the video on xitter: But it should be viewable in full here: https://www.tvo.org/video/has-everyone-forgotten-about-covid
The office of the Chief science officer of Canada has published a report on Long Covid: Dealing with the fallout: Post-COVID Condition and its continued impact on individuals and society. Not much to work with here. This is super basic stuff but at least it's not completely wrong. Which is above average. But the odds of something useful out of it are really low. Zero mention of ME/CFS or similar conditions, this is all presented as a completely new and unheard of before problem. Aside from a single reference to a study, with no details, and a generic mention of associated conditions, which leaves a whole lot of interpretation that we know is heavily biased to keeping us out. Health care is left entirely to provinces in Canada. The provinces can ignore the federal government in most cases. There doesn't seem to be much here. Everything and everyone is just in waiting loop mode for something to work with, for the first high-level clues, seemingly unaware that they could be influencing this process. All of this is really making me think that the whole thing about us being a bunch of whiny low stamina people who can't cope with normal problems is also very much projection. Medicine seems completely inept at finding the first clue. They just wait until they have it, a process mostly down to chance. Which might explain why overall progress has pretty much stalled outside of some common conditions. The era of chance findings is mostly over, and they just don't have a plan B.
Applies to the Province of Ontario. Finally! How new ferritin level flags in Ontario will change your practice. Ontario medical laboratories changing level for clinical decision around iron deficiency. Changing minimum to 30 up/I mean earlier detection, treatment, doctos say "I don't think it's hyperbolic to say we're actually going to be changing the lives of Ontarians," Pai said. "It's going to alert more ordinary Ontarians who didn't even know they were iron deficient. It's going to tell them, 'Listen, this is why you don't feel good.'" LINK
