IN a crowded conference room in Hobart, the banter is reaching boiling point. Psychiatrists from across the country have convened to discuss developments in electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and neuropsychology as part of last week's Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists annual congress. And the topic has turned to the tricky balancing act of maximising efficacy while minimising side effects.

Elderly patients are commonly taking 5, 10 and even 20 different medications- and it can often do more harm than good...

Dementia patients are being drugged with dangerous anti-psychotics rather than safer alternatives that take more time and skill to implement.

Should alternative medicine practitioners be better regulated? Concerns over the variation between quality, skills experience and ethics has led to a government consultation to discuss the options. Support for more stringent regulation has been broad-- and it's come from the groups representing alternative medicine themselves.

LIMP, shrimp, wet and dry. That's how one patient sums up his post-prostate cancer surgery state. Limp because he could no longer get an erection, shrimp because his penis had shrunk a couple of centimetres, wet because he was incontinent and dry because he couldn't ejaculate any more. Every year in Australia about 20,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer, the second most common cancer after skin cancer. Survival rates are high, about 95 per cent in cases where it's caught early and is still localised. But while treatment is often effective, it nearly always leaves scars, even in best-case scenarios.