Journal of law and medicine
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Advance care-planning conversations with people who have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are important because of the severity of the disease and the unpredictable timing of death. Advance care-planning is a process involving conversations about future wishes, including end-of-life care and the appointment of a substitute decision-maker. ⋯ Findings indicated that, although patients and carers would welcome the opportunity to discuss end-of-life decisions, almost no conversation about care-planning had been initiated by health professionals with any of the participants. It also demonstrated that professional support is required to assist with advance care-planning and the completion of the legal advance directive documents.
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Over the past year, several significant reforms to Australia's intellectual property regime have been proposed and passed by Parliament. The Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Raising the Bar) Act 2012 (Cth) made various improvements to Australian patent law, including an improved threshold for patentability, greater clarity around "usefulness" requirements, and the introduction of an experimental use exemption from infringement. Another Bill, the Intellectual Property Laws Amendment Bill 2012 (Cth), currently out for public consultation, would implement a 2003 decision of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) General Council and the 2005 Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health (Doha Declaration). ⋯ The underlying intention of this Bill--meeting public health goals outlined in the 2005 Doha Declaration--stands in juxtaposition to proposed reforms to intellectual property standards pursuant to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade and Investment Agreement (TPPA) that Australia is involved in. Although at a preliminary stage, leaked drafts of relevant intellectual property provisions in the TPPA suggest a privileging of patent monopoly privileges over public health goals. This column weighs the sentiments of the proposed Bill against those of the proposed provisions in the TPPA.
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It is an established legal principle that certain sterilisation procedures fall outside parental power to consent to medical treatment and thus require court authorisation prior to their performance. The practical assessment of whether court authorisation is required has traditionally focused on determining whether the procedure is one which is "therapeutic". ⋯ Cases involving sterilisation in the context of gender dysphoria have also raised some conceptual challenges to the previously utilised "therapeutic"/"non-therapeutic" distinction. This article advocates for the terminology "special medical procedure" to replace the words "therapeutic" and "non-therapeutic" and reintroduces the "but for" test as a potential practical tool to assist medical practitioners to negotiate this area of law successfully.
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This article invites consideration of how Australia should regulate voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. It attempts to pose this question as neutrally as possible, acknowledging that both prohibition and legalisation of such conduct involve decisions about regulation. It begins by charting the wider field of law at the end of life, before considering the repeated, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempts at law reform in Australia. ⋯ The authors consider the arguments for and against legalisation of such conduct along with the available empirical evidence as to what happens in practice both in Australia and overseas. The article concludes by outlining a framework for deliberating on how Australia should regulate voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. It asks a threshold question of whether such conduct should be criminal acts (as they presently are), the answer to which then leads to a range of possible regulatory options.
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Direct-to-consumer genetic testing: for some people it is to be discouraged, controlled, and in some jurisdictions even prohibited. For others, direct-to-consumer testing is merely the natural evolution of the human genome project. ⋯ This article, in making some brief recommendations that can be quickly implemented, seeks to draw a middle ground. The balance proposed aims not to smother what this writer sees as one of the most significant developments in health care in recent times, but to encourage the introduction of consumer-friendly measures that will allow the research community the time to explore the fundamental question posed by direct-to-consumer testing: does it actually do harm?