Author: UBC Abbotsford-Mission Family Practice Residency Program

“As a Collective of Indigenous Peoples and allies, this multi-sector partnership uses culturally safe ways to foster respectful anti-racist, non-discriminatory health care provision and policy change.

The Collective is guided by decolonizing and Indigenous community-led approaches for wholistic Traditional and Western health and wellness health equity research that honors locally distinctive knowledge, experiences, and protocols that benefit all generations. As a Collective of Elders, Knowledge Keepers, Healers, community members, youth and young adults across several Friendship and Métis Centres in the BC Interior, cultural safety education and environments are defined according to community-identified needs and ways of knowing and doing.

In response to the Truth and Reconciliation and In Plain Sight reports, our intention is to recruit, mentor and retain Indigenous undergraduate and graduate students, co-develop culturally safe and relevant curricula, and engage in research inclusive of Indigenous knowledge, philosophies and perspectives.

Current projects include urban, rural/remote health promotion and chronic disease prevention and self-management and urban Indigenous youth/young adult identity and cross-generational learning/relearning about Traditional wellness.”

Learn more on the Indigenous Health Promotion and Cultural Safety Lab via UBC Faculty of Health and Social Development.

“Despite high rates of harm attributable to alcohol use itself and the associated marginalization of illicit drinkers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), alcohol-specific harm reduction services there are under-resourced and highly disconnected from one another. In response to these conditions and high rates of death amongst its membership, the Eastside Illicit Drinkers Group for Education, an affiliate group of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, convened a regular meeting of stakeholders, termed a ‘community of practice’ in 2019 to bring together peers who used beverage and non-beverage alcohol, shelter and harm reduction service providers, public health professionals, clinicians, and policymakers to improve system-level capacity to reduce alcohol-related harm.

The discussions that followed from these meetings were transformed into the Vancouver Alcohol Strategy (VAS), a comprehensive, harm reduction-oriented policy framework for alcohol harm reduction in the DTES.

This article highlights our experiences producing community-led alcohol policy through the VAS with specific attention to the ways in which people who use alcohol themselves were centred throughout the policy development process. We also provide summary overviews of each of the VAS document’s 6 thematic areas for action, highlighting a sampling of the 47 total unique recommendations. Historically, people who use non-beverage alcohol and whose use of alcohol in public spaces is criminalized due to housing precarity and visible poverty have been excluded from the development of population-level alcohol policies that can harm this specific population.

The process of policy development undertaken by the VAS has attempted to resist this top-down approach to public health policy development related to alcohol control by intentionally creating space for people with lived experience to guide our recommendations.

We conclude by suggesting that a grassroots enthusiasm for harm reduction focused policy development exists in Vancouver’s DTES, and requires resources from governmental public health institutions to meaningfully prevent and reduce alcohol-related and policy-induced harms.”

Learn more on Vancouver’s Alcohol Knowledge Exchange: lessons learned from creating a peer-involved alcohol harm reduction strategy in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside via Harm Reduction Journal.

“The internet has become an integral part of the modern lives of adolescents. This allows youth to easily access information and topics of interest online, including sexually explicit material or pornography. Pornography is commonly defined as professionally produced or user-generated sexually explicit pictures or videos intended to sexually arouse the viewer. Increased access to the internet and other online platforms has resulted in a rapid increase in the number of adolescents who encounter and consume pornographic content. As a result, adolescents’ exposure to pornography has been a great concern for parents, teachers and the general public.

Pornography has the potential to impact adolescent development both negatively and positively. It is a greatly complex media, making it a particular concern for primary care providers (PCPs) and parents as they are often the first point of contact when adolescents experience any issues with well-being, including physical or mental health concerns. Having an unbiased understanding of the impact of pornography use on adolescent development lays the groundwork for healthcare providers to support adolescents in their sexual development and health. In this special communication, we seek to provide guidelines for medical providers to integrate routine screening and counselling of pornography use as a part of adolescent primary care and offer recommendations for how to facilitate conversations that may arise between youth and parents regarding the use.”

Read more on “Pornography use among adolescents and the role of primary care” via NIH.

“British Columbia’s advocate for seniors is calling for ‘fundamental reform’ in how the province funds contracted long-term care providers, after a study found for-profit facilities routinely under-delivered care for the funding they received.

Isobel Mackenzie said a review of financial records from 2021 and 2022 shows that long-term care facilities operated by for-profit companies delivered 500,000 fewer care hours than they were funded for by the province.

In comparison, facilities run by non-profit societies delivered 93,000 more care hours than what they were funded to provide.

‘The funding formula that’s supplied is the same,’ Mackenzie said. ‘And this is the result from that funding formula, where we are rewarding — if you view profit as your reward — not spending on the care.’

The province transfers about $2 billion a year to contracted operators to provide long-term care beds, which Mackenzie says is one of the largest annual fund transfers on the provincial budget.”

Read more on “Private seniors homes underspent on patients compared to public facilities, B.C. seniors advocate says: contracted long-term care facilities’ profits are rising much faster than what they spend on patients” via CBC News.

Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American‘s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.

They say that practice makes perfect. But sometimes the best practice is not on a keyboard …[CLIP: Piano sounds]

It’s all in your head. Because a new study shows that the brain takes advantage of the rest periods during practice to review new skills, a mechanism that facilitates learning. The work appears in the journal Cell Reports. [Ethan R. Buch et al., Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay]

Cohen: We know from previous research that interspersing rest with practice during training is advantageous for learning a new skill. In fact, we recently showed that virtually all early skill learning is evidenced during rest rather than during the actual practice.

Read more or listen here on Trying to Train Your Brain Faster? Knowing This Might Help with That via Scientific American.

“Wilderness medicine education is interesting to medical students, yet not widely implemented in Canadian medical curricula. We describe a curriculum for a pre-clerkship wilderness medicine elective at a Canadian medical school. Our study reports increased student awareness of career opportunities in wilderness medicine after elective completion, and interest in hands-on learning for wilderness medicine topics. Medical schools may benefit from incorporating feedback from our elective towards a successful wilderness medicine curriculum in their own programs.”

Call of the wild: creating a formal wilderness medicine elective for Canadian pre-clerkship medical students via CMEJ.

“Another 198 British Columbians died from toxic drugs in July, according to data released Tuesday by the B.C. Coroners Service, bringing the death toll in the first seven months of the year to 1,455.

The coroners service said the 1,455 deaths from January to July are the most ever reported in the first seven months of the year since a public health emergency over drug poisoning deaths in the province was declared in 2016.

‘I am saddened to once again report that British Columbia’s toxic drug crisis shows no signs of abating,’ said Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe in a statement.

It puts the province on pace to potentially exceed the 2,383 deaths recorded last year. A total of 12,739 people in the province have died from drug overdoses in those seven years.”

Read more on B.C. sets new record with 1,455 drug deaths in 1st 7 months of 2023 via CBC News.

“Several major childhood allergies may all stem from the community of bacteria living in our gut, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of British Columbia and BC Children’s Hospital.

The research, published in Nature Communications, identifies gut microbiome features and early life influences that are associated with children developing any of four common allergies — eczema, asthma, food allergy and/or hay fever. The findings could lead to methods of predicting whether a child will develop allergies, and ways to prevent them from developing at all.

‘We’re seeing more and more children and families seeking help at the emergency department due to allergies,’ said Dr. Stuart Turvey, professor in the department of pediatrics at UBC and an investigator at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, and co-senior author on the study. ‘Hundreds of millions of children worldwide suffer from allergies, including one in three children in Canada, and it’s important to understand why this is happening and how it can be prevented.'”

Read more on Researchers discover common origin behind major childhood allergies via UBC News.

For those who noted that the man-made drug Synthroid was in the number one spot on the graph, Statista reports that, “In 2022, prescription drug synthroid – used for the treatment of hypothyroidism – was the most dispensed drug in Canada, coming to a total of more than 20.5 million prescriptions.”

Upon further investigation, Synthroid is the brand name for levothyroxine. “Levothyroxine, also known as L-thyroxine, is a synthetic form of the thyroid hormone thyroxine (T₄).^[4][7] It is used to treat thyroid hormone deficiency (hypothyroidism), including a severe form known as myxedema coma.^[4] It may also be used to treat and prevent certain types of thyroid tumors.^[4] It is not indicated for weight loss.^[4]“

More on Levothyroxine/Liothyronine Combination Therapy and Quality of Life: Is It All about Weight Loss? via European Thyroid Journal.

More on Understanding unapproved use of the approved drugs “off label” via FDA.

Background: The increasing toxicity of opioids in the unregulated drug market has led to escalating numbers of overdoses in Canada and worldwide; takehome naloxone (THN) is an evidence-based intervention that distributes kits containing naloxone to people in the community who may witness an overdose. The purpose of this guidance is to provide policy recommendations for territorial, provincial and federal THN programs, using evidence from scientific and grey literature and community evidence that reflects 11 years of THN distribution in Canada.

Read more on the Guidance on take-home naloxone distribution and use by community overdose responders in Canada via CMAJ.