Dr Leslie O’Looney , 2025-04-15 07:30:00
Welcome to this week’s issue of The Week in Medicine – a round-up of all the happenings in the world of Irish medicine
The Rural, Island and Dispensing Doctors will be having their annual general meeting in the Hodson Hotel in Athlone this year on June 7. They are asking doctors who are interested in attending the event to sign up now so they can manage the numbers better. The Dr Paddy Cosgrave Memorial Cup will also be held during the AGM on the Athlone course which surrounds the hotel grounds.
The Cup is in limbo since last year when a storm was blowing so fierce in Mulranny that standing upright presented a challenge, let alone a round of golf. So the opportunity is there for some doctor to win the 2024 prize. Be your best Rory McIlroy!
You can sign up for the golf by contacting retired rural doctor Brendan Mullins at bafmullins@gmail.com or 087 252 0083, and register for the AGM at ruraldoctors.ie.
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Here at LOL, Leslie O’Looney is very aware of the impending, potentially enormous changes that will be wrought with Artificial Intelligence, or A-One as the US’s education secretary, Linda McMahon, called it last week. She may believe it’s a steak sauce.
Dr Leslie O’Looney, as envisaged by AI
You may not be familiar with Linda, but she’s already had a successful career being the wife of wrestling promoter, Vince McMahon. She met him when she was 13 and he was a mature 16-year-old. They later married when she was 17 and he went on to set up the World Wrestling Federation.
I have been working on AI machines on an experimental basis – including a portrait of the author which you can see here. It’s a good time to familiarise yourself with AI as the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) yesterday launched a scoping consultation to inform the development of a National Framework for the Responsible and Safe Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Health and Social Care.
Commissioned by the Department of Health, HIQA will lead the development of this national framework to ensure that the use of AI in health and social care settings enhances safety, quality and trust for people who rely on these essential services.
And obviously it is a positive step that the Department are trying to ensure that AI is used ethically in healthcare, but will it be in the next month or decade? We have to be careful with future projections in terms of technology development – after all, weren’t we supposed to have driverless taxis and lorries by now?
Feedback can be submitted through an online questionnaire or by downloading a feedback form on www.hiqa.ie and emailing it to HIST@hiqa.ie. This is an important step, and will ensure that patients and doctors are can contribute to policies surrounding the use of AI.
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Novo Nordisk Ireland has announced the launch of its new obesity disease awareness campaign, “It’s about my health. Not just my weight”, to raise awareness about the chronic disease of obesity and to encourage people to have discussions with their healthcare professional about their weight and health. The campaign will launched yesterday and will run for four weeks across various platforms.
Recent research, undertaken by iReach Insights revealed the challenges faced by people in Ireland who want to lose weight. Nearly half (46 per cent) of respondents in the study, who want to lose weight, have never discussed their weight with their healthcare professional, and one-in-four say it’s hard to talk to their healthcare professional about their weight. Only one-in-five, or 22 per cent of respondents who are actively seeking to lose weight have spoken to a healthcare professional about their weight in the last six months.
Over the last 30 years the levels of overweight and obesity in Ireland have increased significantly across all age groups, social class and genders. This shift in population level Body Mass Index (BMI) is heavily influenced and shaped by changes in the environment that we are born into, live, work, play and age in. Ireland has one of the highest levels of obesity in Europe, with 60 per cent of adults and over 20 per cent of children and young people living with overweight and obesity.
The Out of Home advertising campaign will run nationally in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Athlone, and will include a QR code that directs audiences to TruthAboutWeight.ie, a dedicated educational resource from Novo Nordisk Ireland intended for people living with overweight or obesity.
The TruthAboutWeight.ie website is a resource to empower people to learn more about their weight loss journey with information on healthy lifestyle changes and emphasises the importance of a strong partnership with healthcare professionals in managing overweight and obesity. The site provides a useful guide for people to begin a dialogue with their healthcare professional about their weight and their health, suggests some helpful questions to begin the conversation as well as an overview of the science of weight loss and obesity and understanding the impact of obesity on health.
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The ICGP new HQ at 15 Hogan Place in Dublin city centre
Keep in mind if you are visiting the Irish College of General Practitioners in Dublin that they are no longer at the offices they occupied for so many years and are now based at 15 Hogan Place, which is but a hop, skip and a jump from their previous address.
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New Mexico has become the third state in the US to introduce a state-regulated psilocybin access programme. Bill 219 will become the Medical Psilocybin Act after it passed with large majorities in the New Mexico Senate and House.
The new legislation makes it legal in the state for clinicians, manufacturers and patients to grow prescribe and use psilocybin for medical purposes, and it establishes a state department and advisory board to create the state medical psilocybin programme.
Unlike Colorado or Oregon, New Mexico will require patients to receive approval from a licensed healthcare provider before being eligible to receive psilocybin. The Bill defines ‘psilocybin’ as meaning both the naturally occurring psychedelic compound 4-PO-DMT found in mushrooms and its metabolite psilocin’, it does not include synthetic or synthetic analogs of psilocybin, such as those being developed by psychedelics companies such as Compass and the non-profit Usona Institute.
New Mexico’s state-legal psilocybin program is required to begin by the end of 2027.