One of the papers delivered on 25 Feb 2023 at the ACLM was by Prof Judy Clausen on the recent Nebraska legislation to introduce Advanced Mental Health Care Plans in that State. So called ‘Ulysses directives’ enable psychiatric patients such as bipolar or schizophrenic patients subject to episodic relapses to make advanced decisions regarding what they wish to receive when they are incapacitated by psychotic states. As Ulysses and his men were returning home after the Trojan War, ...

I was recently in Orlando Florida for the 63rd Annual Conference of the American College of Legal Medicine. The Australasian CLM has recently established strong links with the American counterpart and my invitation to talk was based on that nexus. I talked about Infanticide laws in Australia which is something that American jurisdictions lack and hence many women are convicted of first degree murder for killing an infant. Four States in the US (Montana ,Utah, Kansas, and Idaho ) have no pro...

The advent of NIPT testing in 2011 in Hong Kong was a breakthrough after many years of fruitless research which focussed on examining complete fetal cells in the maternal blood. Only one fetal cell is usually present per 1 ml of maternal blood. By contrast there are approximately 4.5 x 106 maternal red cells per ml of maternal blood. So it was like looking for a needle in a haystack! Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) has revolutionized the prenatal screening landscape with its high accura...

Cervical Length Assessment
The median cervical length at 20 weeks is 42mm, the 1st centile is 23mm. There appears to be value in linking shortened cervical lengths with an increase in the risk of preterm delivery.Cervical lengths of 30mm (10th centile), 27mm (5th centile) and 22mm (2.5th centile) gave relative risks of preterm birth prior to 37 weeks of 3.8, 5.4, and 6.3, respectively, with even greater relative risk at earlier gestations If a transabdominal ultrasound is undertaken and the c...

It will not have gone unnoticed by many of you that IVF patients in particular are being treated with progesterone vaginal pessaries as a means of enhancing the process of implantation. Progesterone is necessary for successful implantation of the embryo. Luteal phase support is therefore a requirement for optimal outcome following egg collection and embryo transfer in an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle It has been shown that ovarian stimulation during IVF treatment, particularly in cycles...