Patient Lifestyle

I think about certain patients, displaced from the certainties of their lives in their home countries. They have, for complicated reasons, chosen to leave the world they grew up in to make a new life in Canada. The dominant culture here is so foreign, so strange to them. Some are ready to embrace it and go forward, and some are stuck and cannot adjust.

The typical in-person meet and greet and tour put on each year by the Kitchener-Waterloo chamber of commerce was instead held using an online platform.

New options will allow specialists and family physicians in the province to offer more comprehensive virtual visits, giving them more time to take a full patient history, review test results with patients and discuss treatment options.

The abilities to connect and communicate that such programs are meant to foster are all the more important in the pandemic's context.

Some therapies produce small reductions in pain and improvements in quality of life, but evidence is lacking for most therapies.

Dr. Samuel Hickcox, the physician lead for addictions medicine at Nova Scotia Health, said there isn't "high-quality scientific evidence" supporting such a substitution program.