Internal medicine journal
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Internal medicine journal · Aug 2019
Multicenter Study Comparative StudyThe Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre lung cancer clinical audit: collecting the UK National Lung Cancer Audit data from hospitals in Australia.
Clinical audit may improve practice in cancer service provision. The UK National Lung Cancer Audit (NLCA) collects data for all new cases of thoracic cancers. ⋯ Lung cancer care at participating hospitals appeared to be comparable with the UK in 2013. In future, prospective data collection should be harmonised across sites and correlated with survival outcomes. One area of concern was a lack of documented access to specialist nursing services.
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Internal medicine journal · Aug 2019
Oesophageal food bolus obstruction and eosinophilic oesophagitis.
Eosinophilic oesophagitis (EoE) is now a well-recognised cause of dysphagia and food bolus obstruction (FBO). The diagnosis requires histologic confirmation, and the yield is greatest when at least 4 to 6 oesophageal biopsies are taken from different sites. Previous case reports of FBO have demonstrated a low biopsy rate, and as such cases of EoE may have been missed. ⋯ EoE was the most common diagnosis, and was found in 81.3% of patients with FBO aged 40 years or less. 45.5% of patients with FBO were biopsied, and of those, 33.9% were confirmed to have had at least 4 biopsies. EoE is a common cause of FBO and requires appropriate oesophageal sampling to confirm the diagnosis. Cases of EoE may otherwise be missed.
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This update restates the legal limits of consent to medical treatment. It reviews the classic statement of law set down by the case of R v Brown, where 'proper medical treatment' was stated to be exempted from the ordinary laws of consent. This position has been recently developed further by the 2018 English case of R v BM where a non-medical body modification artist was convicted for having carried out substantive body modification procedures. This article considers how these developments may affect Australian law, particularly laws pertaining to cosmetic procedures.