Medicinal psychedelics for mental health and addiction: Advancing research of an emerging paradigm.

The medical use of psychedelic substances (e.g. psilocybin, ayahuasca, lysergic acid diethylamide and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is attracting renewed interest, driven by a pressing need for research and development of novel therapies for psychiatric disorders, as well as promising results of contemporary studies.

Does the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission have a real answer for public hospitals?

Our public hospitals need medical leadership, and partnerships with medical schools can provide it.

Courting the Rockefeller Foundation and other attempts to integrate clinical teaching, medical practice, and research in Melbourne.

Courtesy of the cashed-up Rockefeller Foundation (RF), opportunity knocked in the 1920s for university medical schools committed to closer integration with teaching hospitals. The University of Melbourne Medical School, recognising the opportunity to win RF funds to help with rebuilding, sought government support for an audacious plan consistent with the university-hospital-research triads designed to advance medical science, that had strong RF support. Using a range of local archival sources, this paper details the back story to the development of the plan in the mid-1920s and its presentation to the RF by a high-powered delegation from Victoria in 1927.

Rediscovering university teaching hospitals for Australia.

Partnership between research and health services has a long history in other countries, but has been relatively recent in Australia, with several models arising in the 1960s and 1970s as research-based specialties developed. Since the implementation of Medibank, which became Medicare, Australian Health Care Agreements have been primarily crafted on the basis of transactional numbers, ignoring the need for links with teaching and research and the need to implement new developments. Education and research have been seen as the responsibility of the federal government, and hospitals are progressively less recognised or funded for these functions by the states.

Human embryonic stem cells leap the barrier.

Our democratic processes have moved on - so must our science.