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Beng emphasizes the need for medical researchers and practitioners to find effective ways of steering the public toward evidence-based content and away from myths and pseudoscience, as viral misinformation has become a threat to public health. He adds that the goal of generating medical knowledge, after all, is to improve human health, not receive kudos from colleagues. Likewise, public health organizations need to improve their social media presence to help Internet users find accurate health information.

Though touted as a vital component of modern health care, the electronic health record (EHR) is having an unfortunate effect on many physicians. The clerical burden introduced by EHRs has become a leading cause of physician burnout. EHRs contribute to burnout by turning physicians into unhappy data-entry clerks, and also by enabling 24-hour patient access without any system to provide compensation or coverage, said Dr. Robert Wachter, professor and chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Some doctors have reported working longer hours because of EHRs, many completing their clerical work at home during evenings or weekends. The systems are also designed to make billing easier, not to make clinical care more efficient, others have noted--so tasks such as refilling prescriptions actually take longer then before EHRs.

A cyber-attack that affected more than 60 trusts within the UK's National Health Service (NHS) has spread to more than 200,000 computer systems in 150 countries, including Canada. One hospital in Ontario--Lakeridge Health in Oshawa--reported that its computer system was threatened by the ransomware. The hospital's antivirus software contained the threat, however, and patient care and access to health records were not affected. Hospitals and general practitioners' offices in the UK were not as fortunate, however. On May 12, the \"WannaCry\" ransomware began affecting dozens of NHS trust were hit.

Although electronic health records (EHR) offer many benefits, they have also become an administrative burden for busy doctors and have been linked to physician burnout. Some health care institutions are looking at practical ways to address this problem and reduce \"click fatigue\" in medical practice so doctors can spend more time with patients and less time with screens. The Yale School of Medicine, for example, has turned its attention to EHR inefficiencies and is exploring better ways to enter and retrieve patient data. According to Dr. Allen Hsiao, chief medical information officer at Yale, \"One of the things we realized is that there is still a limitation to the keyboard-and-mouse user interface. Anything we can do to tackle that can make a big difference and help take clicks away for physicians to complete their work.\"

There is perhaps nothing as simultaneously useful and dreaded as pain. In many ways, pain is the ultimate teacher. It teaches us to avoid fire, poison, sharp objects and many other things that could cause us harm. It alerts the body to injury and disease. But it is also unpleasant and, depending on intensity and duration, can have a drastic impact on quality of life. Another thing about pain: We have always had to deal with it, and we always will. Pain is a constant companion for humanity, said Marcia Meldrum, an associate researcher in the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California Los Angeles. In the 1600s, many European doctors gave their patients opium to relieve pain. By the 1800s, ether and chloroform were introduced as anesthetics for surgery. Some doctors were concerned, however, about the ethics of operating on unconscious patients.

Early on an August morning in 1986, after a night without sleep, 16-year-old Keith Meldrum slid low on his seat and dozed off. He was alone, behind the wheel of a Plymouth Duster. The big, steel car missed a corner on the rural highway and rolled end over end. After the car came to a stop, Meldrum stumbled out and collapsed near the Duster's rear bumper. An hour later, Meldrum arrived by ambulance at a trauma center. Seven hours after that, a surgeon left an operating room and told two worried parents that their son would live. People with chronic pain are accustomed to feeling like medicine sees them as difficult patients. And many acknowledge that the perception is accurate.

The practice of coerced sterilization of Indigenous women, an act condemned by human rights' organizations around the world, was supposed to have ended in Canada in the early 1970s. Yet today, four decades later, it still appears in news articles rather than just history books. According to the report \"Tubal Ligation in the Saskatoon Health Region: The Lived Experience of Aboriginal Women,\" released July 27, several Indigenous women have reported being coerced into having tubal ligations in Saskatoon hospitals. The women say they were pressured by health care workers to undergo the procedure while in labor. Some did not fully understand the consequences, believing the procedure to be reversible.

New Brunswick has been slow to implement electronic records because, until 2013, it had no EMR funding program. \"We pressed our provincial government for this program for many years while other provinces raced ahead,\" Anthony Knight, CEO of the New Brunswick Medical Society, wrote in an email to CMAJ. The new program is being rapidly implemented. \"We expect our EMR adoption rate to be one of the fastest-rising in the country over the next three years.\" \"It should have been implemented years ago, and we don't know why it doesn't work,\" says Dr. Yves Robert, secretary of the Collège des médecins du Québec. \"Although millions have been invested, we don't see the results on the screen.\" \"It's not because doctors don't want this tool. They would like to have it, but in Quebec it has been so complicated,\" says Dr. Laurent Marcoux, president of the Quebec Medical Association. \"It's a real need and many doctors want it, but to implement it is a big effort and we lose a lot of time.\"

According to a recent survey of more than 15,000 doctors in the US, about 42% of physicians report feeling burned out. The highest rates of burnout were reported in the specialties of critical care (48%), neurology (48%) and family medicine (47%). To address this problem, the American Medical Association has recommended several systems-based approaches to reducing burnout. These approaches include implementing team-based care, enhancing communication with team huddles, developing clinician float pools to cover life events, including scores for physician satisfaction and well-being in institutional success metrics, allowing flexible schedules, and creating a wellness committee and infrastructure.

When Dr. Christine Moutier worked for the University of California San Diego, she was asked by the dean of medical education to find out the number of deaths by suicide among faculty physicians. She began looking at the previous 15 years, expecting to find they had lost four, perhaps five, doctors to suicide. To her surprise, and dismay, the number was actually 13. She would venture to guess that their experience of suicide loss is not necessarily different from other academic institutions, said Moutier, now chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, during a session at the Canadian Conference on Physician Health in Ottawa. Moutier presented data on the mental illness toll on doctors in the US. Research shows that 39% of physicians have experienced depression, twice the rate of the general population.