I AM not ashamed to say that huge swathes of 2022 have completely baffled me. Welcome to the last issue of InSight+ for the year, by the way. We’ve had a cracking year, with our readership growing by about 40% on 2021 by user numbers, and our articles being clicked on just shy of 895 000 times in…

IN The Conversation earlier this year, Tim Baker described consultations with his oncologist: a distressing hour in the waiting room, and then the brief (ten minutes) and cursory consultation. Reading it was upsetting. I wanted him to have had the experience of an authentically engaged and caring clinical…

I STARTED online yoga classes in early 2020. There was no plan, no thought “this will help”. It was a happenstance of friendship, loss, birthday, expertise, and the sudden availability of time. As we started the Pandemic Years, I was travelling between capital cities, and rural clinical work, multiple…

Medicine, in my experience, is not always a precise business. There are decisions we make, there are choices. We make mistakes and we have to own them. And we are better at it when a community of thoughtful, experienced and clever people put their collective minds to work. IT’S the story that keeps…

While COVID-19 is busy finding the unvaccinated and the undervaccinated in order to keep spreading, we are left with COVID-19 infection and its sequelae being one more disease of social and physical marginalisation and of poverty AFTER masking up to pay for petrol last week, I waited for cyclists to…

MEDICARE reform that supports GP advocacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients is crucial to finally closing the gap and eliminating systemic racism in Australia’s health care system, say experts. In an editorial published by the MJA, Professor Lilon Bandler, a GP and Principal Research…

IMPLEMENTING voluntary assisted dying (VAD) legislation within a health service demands respectful communication and collaboration between health professionals and community. Writing in the MJA, authors from Western Health in Melbourne, led by Ms Sarah Booth, the Social Work Research and Data Lead,…

“If we are committed to Black lives, we should be committed to diagnosing the problem properly. We have the wrong diagnosis here, so of course, we are giving the wrong treatment. If it worked, we would have seen changes.” ASSOCIATE Professor Chelsea Bond, Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman…

“If we are not put on this world to help others, then what else is there?” Faith Bandler A HUGE majority of Australians – 90.77%, in fact – voted “yes” to the 1967 referendum to change the Australian Constitution, removing two references that discriminated against Indigenous people. It signalled…