Boundary violations occur when a doctor behaves in an unprofessional and untrustworthy manner by misusing their power in the doctor-patient relationship. This may result in harming the patient in some way. I guess many of us would have transgressed at least one such boundary such as treating family members. The following are examples of boundary violations:Examples of practitioner-patient boundary breaches include Having a personal and/or sexual relationship with a patient (even a former...

Arlie Loughnan and Mike O’Connor* The deliberate killing of a child by its mother is abhorrent and is associated in the minds of many with mental illness and in particular with postnatal depression. However, at least 50% of perpetrators are neither “mad” nor “bad”, and mothers who kill children are not “unhinged” by pregnancy or childbirth. We propose a different explanation: “blind rage” or “overwhelmed syndrome”, whereby par...

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...