A Little Food For Thought On Tests That May Be Worth Having

This appeared a day or so ago:

Health tests to think about now, and in the not-too-distant future

So what are the tests available now that could save your life, as well as the tests on the horizon that could revolutionise preventive healthcare? A doctor shares his suggestions.

Steve Robson

5:00 AM August 24, 2025

When it comes to our health, prevention is definitely better than cure. Fortunately modern medicine gives us the opportunity to find many diseases in their early stages, allowing treatment before we are affected seriously or permanently.

What, then, are the key health checks all of us should think about – and discuss with our doctors? I’d like to share my suggestions with you.

Australians already are fortunate to have a world-leading set of health screening tests freely available. Adults may participate in screening for bowel, breast, and cervical cancer, and all newborns are eligible for blood-spot and hearing screens.

These national screening programs have a specific aim – to detect common and serious conditions such as bowel cancer in their early stages. Yet there are many other important and common health conditions for which the government does not offer free screening programs, but for which early detection greatly improves the outlook.

While the national screening programs make economic sense – it is cheaper for governments to fund the screening programs than pay for treating the established disease – having other screening tests are much more individual decisions.

I want to share with you some tests available now that could save your life, as well as some tests on the horizon that could revolutionise preventive healthcare.

Deciding whether to have a screening test can be difficult and requires a careful discussion with your doctor. Each of us has different risk factors, life circumstances and needs. There is no single best decision. Screening tests also carry potential harms including the cost of having the test, or of finding something ambiguous that might lead to further tests or unnecessary treatment.

Tests available now

Bone density X-ray

Osteoporosis – thinning of the bones – is a potentially catastrophic condition that puts tens of thousands of people in hospital every year. Almost one in six Australians aged 70 or older is affected. Hip, wrist or spine fractures are not only traumatic but contribute to thousands of deaths every year.

Once osteoporosis is established it is almost impossible to reverse or even stop its progress, making it very difficult to protect against fractures. The good news is that osteoporosis may be prevented in many cases – but the diagnosis must be made years early for prevention to work.

Bone-density scans usually take less than half an hour to perform. An X-ray scanner passes over your body as you lie on a bench, taking images of your lower back and hip region. Like all X-rays the bone density test exposes you to radiation, but fortunately the dose is low. For most people, any risk from this X-ray exposure is greatly outweighed by the opportunity to prevent the complications of osteoporosis.

Who should think about bone-density screening? People with a family history of osteoporosis, especially in women, are at increased risk. Smoking and long-term alcohol consumption are also red flags, as well as conditions that lead to immobility such as arthritis especially if there is long-term treatment with steroids.

Some bone-density tests are covered by Medicare, but not all. The out-of-pocket may be close to $200 in many cases.

Dementia screening

More than 400,000 Australians live with dementia and it is the second most common cause of death in our country. It also is a major cause of debility and brings disruption and sadness to millions of family members and carers. Once established there is no known effective cure.

The absence of an effective cure, however, does not mean that identifying dementia in its early stages is not worthwhile. Indeed the opposite is true – there are many effective ways of improving the outlook for people when the diagnosis is suspected early.

A number of relatively simple tests, such as the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination (ACE-R), have been shown to be effective in identifying the early signs.

Non-medical treatments such as aerobic exercise and social activities may help to decrease the risk of dementia. Picture: Getty Images

Because dementia can be worsened by other conditions such as depression, cardiovascular disease, or the side effects of medications, the chance to act early to slow the course of the disease should not be missed. Even non-medical treatments such as aerobic exercise, mental stimulation, and social activities may help decrease the risk of cognitive decline.

CT heart calcium score

Heart disease is one of the most common and most serious chronic conditions and almost 60,000 Australians will experience a heart attack each year. If you have risk factors for heart disease – such as high cholesterol, being overweight, or smoking – then you should discuss the test with your doctor. Such a discussion should prompt further assessment of your risk and, if warranted, referral for screening with a CT heart calcium scan.

The test looks for a build-up of calcium in the coronary arteries – the vessels that supply the heart wall muscle. If these vessels become blocked the result is a heart attack. It is a non-invasive process and involves being passed through a CT scanner which takes images of the heart and the blood vessels that supply it, looking for the amount of calcium in the vessel walls.

The amount of calcium is given a score, and a high score likely will lead your doctor to recommend more detailed review and testing. Although the test is not perfect, the early detection of coronary artery disease can be lifesaving. The test is not covered by Medicare and typically will cost somewhere between $200 and $300.

Kidney function test

Some 2.7 million Australians are living with some form of kidney disease and almost 16000 people receive regular dialysis. Around 1000 kidney transplants are performed in Australia every year.

There are many causes of chronic kidney disease, with diabetes accounting for almost 40 per cent of all newly detected cases. High blood pressure is also linked to kidney conditions, as well as immune and genetic conditions. Like the other conditions I have discussed, kidney disease is very difficult to cure once established. Finding it early is the key to a good long-term outlook in most cases.

A urine test looking for blood or protein is one of three components of a kidney screening. Picture: Getty Images

Your doctor can arrange a standard kidney health check easily. The three components of a screening kidney health check are blood-pressure measurement, a urine test looking for blood or protein, and a blood test measuring chemicals such as creatinine that become elevated early in the course of kidney disease. A kidney health check is inexpensive and safe.

A dental check-up

Because routine dentistry isn’t covered by Medicare, many people see dental check-ups as something of a luxury. Nothing could be further from the truth. Untreated dental conditions not only threaten pain and the loss of teeth, but untreated gum disease is associated with heart disease, dementia, and even pregnancy complications.

Many dental conditions progress silently, causing pain or other symptoms only in their very late stages. For this reason each of us ideally should have a dental check once a year, and certainly no longer than two years. Your dentist will look for tooth decay, gum disease, and cancers of the mouth and tongue.

The cost of a check-up with a careful tooth clean will be about $200, a little more if X-rays are required. Looking after your teeth is a very good investment, though, and will pay off handsomely with age. Like all preventive measures, the earlier you can start the better the long-term benefits will be.

Tests for the future

I have covered screening tests that are available now and that are worth discussing with your doctor, but what screening tests are on the horizon? What might we be asking our doctors about in the near future?

DNA screen

The test that everyone is talking about is DNA screen, a simple saliva test that can predict our risk of developing a range of preventable cancers and heart disease. These are among the most common causes of premature death in Australia, and once they produce symptoms are very difficult to treat. Prevention of early heart attack or aggressive bowel or ovary cancer is the only known way to ensure a good outcome.

The technology of the DNA screen test has already been thoroughly assessed and established. Studies have found that one Australian in 50 carries the genes responsible for these formidable health conditions.

The good news is that preventative and risk-reducing measures are available for all of the serious conditions the test might detect. Indeed, so important is the opportunity for risk reduction that testing is best performed before the age of 40 years. Economic studies have shown that the cost of testing would save an enormous amount of money now spent treating cancer or heart disease.

The bad news? Even though this proven testing is available now there is no government funding for DNA screen yet. Hopefully this will change soon and all of us will have the chance to choose to check our risk at minimal cost in the near future.

Cell-free DNA cancer screening

When cancer cells divide their DNA is usually scrambled. This abnormal DNA may be released into the bloodstream once the cells it originated in break down and die. So-called cell-free DNA technology has been used routinely for testing in pregnancy for years now, but could be re-purposed to seek signs of very early cancer growth in the body. Finding abnormal DNA floating free in the bloodstream will allow early cancerous tumours to be found – long before development of symptoms or, indeed, before ultrasounds or other imaging tests show an abnormality.

Detecting abnormal DNA is now a relatively inexpensive technology and only a small amount of blood is needed. This is an exciting space to watch and hopefully will lead to early-stage cancer screening in the very near future.

Whole-body scans

Scanning the whole body with MRI has been offered as a potential way of detecting disease in its early stages, with some celebrities and influencers promoting it. Unfortunately it is way too early to recommend such screening at the moment – but this could be about to change.

Using MRI scans to look for hidden conditions in a person who otherwise seems well and healthy is a recipe for harm as things stand. Such scans are much more likely to detect benign conditions rather than any disease posing serious health risks. When innocent changes are detected people are likely to undergo potentially dangerous testing or even surgery to further investigate the “abnormal findings”. More damage than benefit usually occurs.

Using MRI scans on a person who otherwise seems healthy is a recipe for harm. Picture: Getty Images

That could change and change soon. The use of AI techniques could well help sort out the findings to worry about and what changes could safely be ignored. Although MRI itself is very safe, the cost presently is high and resources are limited. The carbon footprint of such an extensive MRI is considerable too.

In the not-too-distant future, though, and with the help of rapidly advancing AI techniques and energy sustainability, it might well be possible to have a scan that looks for multiple important conditions at an early stage – a concept straight out of science fiction.

Steve Robson is professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Australian National University and former president of the Australian Medical Association. He is a board member of the National Health and Medical Research Council.

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This column is published for information purposes only. It is not intended to be used as medical advice and should not be relied on as a substitute for independent professional advice about your personal health or a medical condition from your doctor or other qualified health professional.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/health/medical/health-tests-to-think-about-now-and-in-the-nottoodistant-future/news-story/8c9d434443cd3920d1cdf68cabf4f4ca

A little list to consider if you have some time to get a few tests!

David.

T Think There Is A Pretty Easy Answer To The Question Regarding The Recent Electoral Failure Of The Liberals.

This appeared last week:

Chris Uhlmann

Why are the Liberals so bad at telling their own success story?

Australia owes its existence to liberal thinking and was built on the firm foundations of its creed: individual freedom, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the family as the bedrock of society, equality of opportunity, enterprise, liberty and a fair go. Pictures: News Corp

10:00 PM August 22, 2025

Why are the Liberals so bad at telling their own story? This is not just a critique of incumbent MPs and senators; it has held true of the party for decades.

Stories and mythologies matter. They are the scaffolding of identity and meaning. We live in the stories we inherit, and for the better part of the past half-century the Liberals have allowed their opponents to shape the national tale. Labor casts itself as the party of progress and ideas, the architect of every great reform, while painting the Liberals as dull, reactionary administrators. That frame has become the shorthand of our history.

But history shows that when it came to shaping the nation itself, it was the liberals who laid the foundations. Australia was born of liberal ideals, yet the party that bears that name has rarely claimed its inheritance.

This is not to deny Labor its achievements. It has much to be proud of. But re-reading its history in the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the dismissal of Gough Whitlam underscores that Whitlam’s enduring achievement was not in reshaping the nation so much as remaking an ossified Labor Party.

Whitlam described himself as “the first of the middle-class radicals” and infuriated Labor’s old guard, none more so than Arthur Calwell. In 1966 Whitlam branded the ALP executive “the 12 witless men” and came close to expulsion. Two years later he briefly resigned the leadership after another clash, prompting Calwell to rage in a telegram: “You are not, and never were, a Labor man.”

Whitlam prevailed, liberalising Labor and recasting it as a party of the middle class.

With his 1972 triumph Whitlam began shaping the tale that progressivism consigned the Liberals to history’s margins. That myth, burnished over time, became a powerful weapon in Labor’s political armoury.

History also highlights another truth: Labor has been uneasy with the Constitution since 1901 because it had no hand in writing it. As former minister and historian David Kemp notes in A Free Country, the ideas that governed Australia at the turn of the previous century “were principally those of Britain’s liberal intellectual culture”.

The authors of the Constitution were classical liberals who valued the rule of law, parliamentary government, property rights and liberty.

Lessons of history

The defining moment in our history was the birth of a nation, and it was an entirely liberal project.

This should be the wellspring of the modern party’s identity, if only it could work out how to embrace it.

And here is something you won’t hear in Labor speeches: much of the labour movement opposed Federation.

In NSW those who supported it were expelled, while in Queensland some feared it might weaken the campaign against “coloured labour”.

In 1901 all parties supported the White Australia policy, but none more enthusiastically than Labor.

In his book I Remember, former NSW premier Jack Lang called it “Australia’s Magna Carta”, proudly noting that the “total exclusion of coloured and other undesirable races” was etched into Labor’s first federal platform in 1900.

He admitted it was about race, but also about wages: “From the start it was a simple bread-and-butter issue.

Australian workers were simply trying to defend their own living standards.”

That Labor would want to bury this history is understandable. That it continues to recast the past to accuse others of racism is unforgivable.

Yet when Foreign Minister Penny Wong delivered the 2022 Whitlam Oration she ignored Labor’s record and declared: “Gough described racism as the ‘common denominator’ of a whole range of Menzies-era foreign policies.”

The White Australia policy remained in Labor’s platform until 1967, and its old guard fought Whitlam and Don Dunstan to keep it.

The final vestiges were not erased until 1971. It was the governments of Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon that progressively dismantled White Australia between 1958 and 1971. Labor under Whitlam followed; it did not lead.

Wong’s charge of Menzies’ foreign policy racism also jars with a remarkable wartime radio address by Menzies.

He condemned Curtin government propaganda that sought to stir racial hatred of the Japanese, calling it “fantastically foolish and dangerous”.

He said “hatred is the mark of a small man” and warned that if war bred only bitterness, then peace would be “merely the prelude to disaster and not an end of it”.

Wong also claimed Whitlam shifted Australia’s perspective of Asia.

Menzies made his mark

Yet it was Menzies who set about rebuilding relations with Japan in the shadow of the war. He backed the 1952 peace treaty and the reopening of embassies in Canberra and Tokyo, and in 1953 told Australians it was time to move on from the conflict.

Former Labor industry minister John Button had the grace to acknowledge the significance of this in his book Flying the Kite: “In the early 1950s prime minister Menzies invited a small delegation of Japanese industrialists to Australia. It was, in the post-war climate, a courageous and prescient invitation.”

Nippon Steel’s Eishiro Saito later described the visit as a seminal moment in the relationship. From that point, Australia’s exports of coal and iron ore to Japan began a steady climb until Japan became our largest trading partner.

It was Menzies who signed the 1957 Commerce Agreement in Tokyo, and who later hosted prime minister Nobusuke Kishi in Canberra. Australians knew Kishi’s past. He had been imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal until 1948 because of his role in Japan’s wartime government.

Think about that in context: many Australians still loathed Japan, and some in Menzies’ own government, such as Alexander Downer’s father, were former prisoners of war.

To invite Kishi and forge this partnership, at this time, required remarkable political courage. Union protests greeted the trade deal and Kishi’s 1957 visit, the ACTU warned of lost jobs and ex-servicemen’s groups condemned any reconciliation with Japan.

Yet it is Labor’s caricature of Menzies that endures, and the blame for that lies with the Liberal Party’s failure to tell its own story.

Wong’s speech also repeated the line that Whitlam “withdrew our troops from Vietnam”. But by the time he came to power in December 1972, all combat troops had already returned and only some advisers remained.

Vietnam is not the only case where Labor overreaches and Liberals undersell their record. Whitlam is routinely credited with the explosion of Australian arts in the 1970s, yet it was Liberal prime minister Gorton who created the Australian Council for the Arts in 1968 and launched the Australian Film Development Corporation in 1970, contributions that largely have been forgotten.

The Liberals cannot win a battle they do not fight. And in the history wars, they are scarcely in the ring. Some, such as Kemp, John Howard and Tony Abbott, have tried to rebalance the books. But it should be the work of every Liberal MP and senator to reclaim their heritage in our national story.

Since its birth this nation has had two great political traditions, and for 124 years they have served us well. Labor’s story is well told. The Liberal story must be retold, beginning with its intellectual roots. Australia owes its existence to liberal thinking and was built on the firm foundations of its creed: individual freedom, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the family as the bedrock of society, equality of opportunity, enterprise, liberty and a fair go.

This tradition is timeless, and as vital now as ever. Unless the Liberal Party can tell that story to a new generation, it risks being written out of history.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/why-are-the-liberals-so-bad-at-telling-their-own-success-story/news-story/5dd75f5d1a85cd7d44c897e1d59a2db6

To me the key issue is that the current Liberals are – in most States- - a disorganized rabble who are not actually electable! Australians seem happy with centrist to slightly left governments almost everywhere and until someone can make a strong case for change I suspect the status quo will prevail!

The Liberals have a lot of work to do pretty much everywhere, and until that is done the status quo is likely to persist!

Anyone have any suggestions for them?

David.

Many Are Wondering If We Are Pushing Too Hard To Centrally Regulate The Internet.

This appeared a day or so ago:

Jack the Insider

Australia’s online regulation overreach is coming to a screen near you

The Albanese government is cracking down on tech companies giving children unbridled access to explicit content online.

Updated 3:19 PM August 22, 2025

Age verification is coming to Australia’s internet users but our new net nanny systems will affect everyone, not just teenagers.

In June, the federal government introduced rules forcing big telcos like Google to check the ages of logged-in users, in an effort to limit children’s access to harmful content such as pornography. These rules become law by year’s end. Google searches undertaken by minors will have to exclude references to sexually explicit and violent material.

People who stream their television may have already experienced age verification interactions. In July, I was attempting to stream a show on Disney Plus only to be served up with a series of prompts requiring an email address, my age and my gender. Other streamers are doing the same or soon will.

Australians are being given a foretaste of the future. In the UK, the Online Safety Act obliged sites which show sexually explicit or violent material to ensure minors are excluded and introduced advanced age verification checks last month.

A data analytics firm in the UK which studied online access to pornography reported a 47 per cent decline in traffic to the UK’s most popular pornography site, PornHub, a similar slump in viewers at another pornography site, XVideos with the subscription service OnlyFans down 10 per cent in the first weeks of August compared to a period in the previous month prior to the implementation of age checks.

This is the sort of outcome that policy makers would hail as proof of the stunning success of their interventions but it is a long way from reducing social harms. In fact, all the Online Safety Act may have done in the UK is push traffic to less regulated sites. The same data revealed that traffic had increased in sites that refuse to play ball with the legislators. It almost goes without saying that these sites are likely to contain prohibited content, including sexually violent material, incest and bestiality.

A day after the new rules came into force in the UK, two ethical hackers appeared on Britain’s Sky News and bypassed the age verification checks within a few minutes. Multiple viewers contacted the network to confirm the ease in which they were able to get around the age verification checks with one boasting he had done so “in under 30 seconds.”

The UK’s media regulator, OfCom, has recommended content providers choose one of seven age verification checks. The first is called facial age recognition where a face is shown by photo or video and technology determines the age. This raises a serious question: what’s the difference between a 17-year-old face and an 18-year-old face?

While social media restrictions are similarly sidestepped by tech savvy kids, there is almost universal support for them.

Other methods are, perhaps less fallible but far more intrusive. These include banking or telco account checks, sharing of digital ID and email based age estimation where an email address is offered to the provider who uses technology to ascertain the age of the person by examining the duration of other accounts, like electricity and gas bills.

All of these methods are being trialled in Australia.

The other salient point is that data from age verification checks will be stored somehow or other. In the UK, regulators have been quick to point out that users’ activities on porn sites will not be stored. They say the data which may include digital ID, and images taken from passports or driver’s licenses will be encrypted but the best means of preventing hacking into databases is to have no database at all.

Australians will not relish these intrusions and the murmurs now of privacy concerns are likely to become a roar by December when age verification becomes law.

In an attempt to diminish the impact of social harms from kids watching pornography, the Australian government has determined that everyone has to engage in the exercise. Anyone who uses a Google search engine – and that is 90 per cent of Australia’s internet users, or Microsoft Bing searches, pretty much the remaining 10 per cent – will be obliged to verify their age by whatever means the telcos determine.

Google and Microsoft have been told that from December 27 they will have to use some form of age-assurance technology on users when they sign in, or face fines of just under $50 million for every breach.

It may well be that these telco giants already hold sufficient data on their users to determine their age and make the shift seamlessly for most users but given the sheer size of the fines, they will be keen to make sure.

Google threatened to sue Australian government over social media ban proposal

Google is threatening to sue the Australian government if YouTube is included in its social media ban. There are no... more

It’s important to remember that these new rules are distinct from the social media restrictions for those under the age of 16. While those laws are similarly sidestepped by tech savvy kids, there is almost universal support for them. I am one of the standouts, not just because I think the restrictions are ineffective but as they stand, the rules are an abrogation of parental responsibilities. Parents have decided not to have valuable interactions with their children, handpassing the exercise on to the government.

I know, too, the great harms that come from the internet. I have written previously of child exploitation networks, like 764, operating on platforms as banal as Roblox, targeting children and shifting to anonymous platforms like Discourse where nihilistic violent extremists, often children themselves, have been found to extort and exploit other children including urging them to commit acts of self harm.

What can I say? The online world is a dark place for many. However, what we know about prohibition – the banning of or over-regulation by government – is that it will necessarily lead to a dark underbelly where appalling practices continue largely out of reach of regulators and law enforcement.

In the not-so-distant past, governments would have turned to public interest campaigns, advertising and messaging to prevent social harms. Now, it’s an all-in exercise, a legislative sledgehammer to smash a rotten egg.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/australias-online-regulation-overreach-is-coming-to-a-screen-near-you/news-story/34c0dd4a4d36c76cb40a9e5d4c14ad8b

I have to say I wonder just how any campaign to restrict internet access for adolescents given just how tech literate they mostly are and how easily they will by-pass any restrictions that will still permit normal adult access to adult material!

Overseas experience would suggest effective adolescent blocks would catch many innocent adults – who struggle with using the tech!

As always the answer is parental guidance and supervision of the young – but most adults seem to struggle with actually doing that.

My guess is that control of adolescent access to the internet is pretty much always going to wind up in the too hard basket! The article above is excellent and shows just hard all this can becone!

What do you think?

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 808 – Results – 24 August 2025.

Here are the results of the recent poll.

Do You Think Vladimir Putin Outfoxed Donald Trump At The Recent Alaska Summit?

Yes                                                                       14 (88%)

No                                                                          1 (6%)

I Have No Idea                                                      1 (6%)

Total No. Of Votes: 14

A very clear vote with Putin doing the Donald over!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

Poor voter turnout – question must have been useless. 

1 of 16 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

Iron Deficiency Is A Very Serious And An Under Recognized Problem In Young Women

This appeared last week:

More awareness is vital to say the least:

Gaslit, dismissed and treated as hypochondriacs: The gender divide in iron deficiency

By Kate Aubusson

August 16, 2025

Iron-deficient and anaemic women are being gaslit and denied effective treatment, while pathology companies systematically report “normal” blood test results for females who would be diagnosed with iron deficiency if they were male.

Among the more than 2000 women who shared accounts of medical misogyny with this masthead were more than 50 women with debilitating iron deficiency or anaemia who were treated as hypochondriacs or had their symptoms dismissed by healthcare professionals, including one woman whose haemoglobin count was that of a traumatic car crash victim.

Other women described their heavy menstrual bleeding being written off as a normal, untreatable part of womanhood, and experiencing damaging delays in investigating serious underlying causes of their low iron. Iron is an essential mineral for organ function, from carrying oxygen in red blood cells, to immune and brain health.

Some of Australia’s biggest pathology providers have for years set a significantly lower benchmark for what they consider “normal” iron stores in females compared to males, leaving a huge proportion of iron-deficient women undiagnosed and untreated.

“The fact that there is a difference in what is considered iron-deficient between men and women is insane,” Professor Nada Hamad, a Sydney haematologist and clinician researcher, said.

“Can you imagine how gaslit these women are when they are told that their iron level is normal, when, by definition, a man with the same results would have been diagnosed iron-deficient?” said obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Talat Uppal, a leading international expert in heavy menstrual bleeding.

This is a modal window.

Following questions during this investigation, laboratory heads of pathology providers convened an emergency meeting, and those still upholding the “sexist practice” told this masthead that it would be overhauled.

Meanwhile, women with chronically depleted iron stores are offered no alternative to over-the-counter iron tablets, despite reporting brutal side effects, no improvements and pleading for iron infusions.

“I’ve got patients who have had untreated iron deficiency for years, then they wind up in emergency departments severely anaemic,” specialist haematologist Dr Lisa Clarke said.

“All because there are people in the healthcare system who truly don’t believe iron deficiency without anaemia in women is a problem.”

The women, doctors and experts are speaking not to blame individual healthcare professionals, but to expose entrenched, systemic gender bias in healthcare systems that can be traced back centuries, long before iron deficiency was believed to cause “hysteria” in women of the 16th century.

‘You have the blood count of a shark attack victim’

Abigail Rodwell had grown accustomed to being told by GPs not to worry about her fatigue, headaches and gastrointestinal symptoms.

“I can’t tell you how many times doctors have told me: you run a business, you’re studying your master’s degree, your doctorate, and you have two little children. You’re fine. Just rest,” Rodwell said.

Abigail Rodwell had been iron deficient for years but was offered no alternative to iron supplements with intolerable side effects.

“I’m pretty confident that men who work and have kids don’t hear that. They hear: how can we fix you?”

Rodwell got on with life until one evening in 2016.

“I was vomiting, I was struggling to breathe, and my whole body was cramping up,” she said.

Rodwell recalls screaming in pain as the paramedics carried her into the emergency department.

“The head nurse yelled at me, ‘I don’t know if you’re on drugs or something, but you will stop screaming’,” she said.

The mother of two was admitted for suspected influenza, but her blood test results showed her haemoglobin was 56 grams per litre (g/L). Normal haemoglobin levels typically range from 115 to 165 g/L. Rodwell was severely anaemic.

Iron is essential to make haemoglobin – a protein in red blood cells that binds to oxygen and transports it around the body. It is critical for tissue and organ function. Without treatment, iron-deficiency anaemia can cause life-threatening complications, including heart failure.

The attending gastroenterologist assumed she had cancer, Rodwell said.

“After an endoscopy, the gastroenterologist just said, ‘You don’t have cancer’ and told me to see my GP. That was it. Consultation over.”

At her GP, she was scolded for not taking iron supplements, Rodwell recalled.

Rodwell had tried taking various forms of supplements for years, but she couldn’t tolerate the gastrointestinal side effects.

Over-the-counter oral iron is the first-line treatment for iron deficiency and can be an effective option. But 30 to 70 per cent of people can’t tolerate the gastrointestinal side effects, including nausea, diarrhoea, constipation, and heartburn.

“[My GP] was so curt and rude, I had to stop myself from crying,” Rodwell said.

Between 2018 and 2020, her health slowly deteriorated. She had a constant headache, extreme fatigue, weakness, dizziness, pale skin, cold hands and feet, a slightly swollen tongue and loss of appetite.

“I was crunching ice all the time,” Rodwell said, unaware that craving ice is a symptom of iron deficiency.

Medical misogyny: a call for action

The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald last year launched an investigation into medical misogyny: ingrained, systemic sexism across Australia’s healthcare system, medical research and practise. 

More than 2000 women shared their experiences as part of our crowd-sourced investigative series, which prompted a national outpouring of grief and frustration as women described feeling gaslit, dismissed or being told their pain was “all in their heads”. 

We call on the federal government to boost Medicare funding for GP appointments that last more than 20 minutes to improve care for women and others with complex health conditions. 

The Albanese government and the Coalition have promised to pour $8.5 billion into Medicare to make GP visits more affordable and improve bulk billing rates, but longer 20-minute appointments will receive a smaller proportional funding increase. 

Doctors have warned that these policies could further disadvantage women by continuing to incentivise shorter consultations, which don’t give GPs enough time to address menopause, pelvic pain and other women’s health issues.

“I was just withering away, but I was still working. I would just take myself to the doctor, and the doctor would look at me and she wouldn’t be worried.”

In mid-2020, another blood test showed her haemoglobin was 53. Her GP sent her straight to hospital, where staff had prepared the resuscitation room.

“They said, ‘Do you know you could die at any second? You have the blood count of a car crash or shark victim’,” Rodwell recalled.

But she hadn’t had traumatic blood loss. It was her iron that had drained away.

Clarke was the haematologist assigned to Rodwell’s case. She said years of living with undiagnosed food intolerances had likely damaged Rodwell’s gastrointestinal tract, preventing her from absorbing iron from her food.

“Iron deficiency is so insidious,” Clarke said. “Abby had become used to functioning with low iron levels and subsequent anaemia until her haemoglobin finally dropped to critical levels.”

Clarke ordered a blood transfusion and two iron infusions.

“It was like I walked into sunshine from a dark room,” Rodwell said. “Everything, in hindsight, had been slower and more exhausting, both mentally and physically.”

The blood test that erases iron-deficient women

A contentious debate is playing out in clinics, laboratories and medical journals between clinicians and researchers, raising the alarm about untreated iron deficiency in women and their colleagues who don’t believe it’s an issue worth treating.

Editorial

Medical misogyny

Ignored and dismissed, women raise voices against medical misogyny

The Herald's View

Editorial

“It’s incredibly frustrating because iron is critical for multiple functions beyond haemoglobin and red blood cells,” Clarke said.

But iron deficiency alone can impair the body’s cellular energy production.

“Iron is also required for the production of our feel-good messaging in our brains – serotonin and dopamine, which is how iron deficiency can be linked to depressed mood,” Clarke said.

There is a vagueness to some signs of iron deficiency (brain fog, fatigue) that medicine is not well-equipped to decipher.

Symptoms can also include hair loss, headaches, easy bruising, restless leg syndrome, a weakened immune system, and an eating or craving of dirt, paper, and ice.

A blood test for ferritin – a protein that stores iron, mainly in the liver – is the most sensitive indicator of a person’s iron stores.

National guidelines by the Royal College of Pathologists Australia were updated in 2021 to define iron deficiency as a ferritin level below 30 micrograms per litre (μg/L) for adults, eliminating a long-standing sex bias that meant women needed to have significantly lower ferritin levels than males to be diagnosed. Some pathology services, including Laverty, 4cyte and NSW Health Pathology use the same.

But other pathology providers, as well as the Australian Red Cross LifeBlood, still define iron deficiency as below 15μg/L for women. The variation means that for women whose ferritin level falls in the no man’s land between 15 and 30μg/L, getting diagnosed (and having a chance of treating it) can depend on which pathology service draws her blood. It’s a global problem.

Estimates suggest between 25 and 50 per cent of iron-deficient women are missed using 15 μg/L as a cut-off.

“I am seeing woman after woman who tell me that their iron results are always normal,” said Uppal, Australia’s appointee to the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics Committee on Menstrual Disorders and Related Health Impacts.

“I say, ‘No, your ferritin is 18. You have been iron-deficient for years’.

“Using lower, inconsistent cut-offs for women only perpetuates gender-based inequity and delays care for a condition that is both common and treatable,” Uppal said. “It is one of the reasons women with heavy menstrual bleeding can suffer and not get timely medical care.”

Setting reference ranges is not an exact science. But pathology sector insiders said the decision to set a lower floor for women comes down to the concern that too many women would be diagnosed as iron-deficient.

Up to 34 per cent of Australian women of reproductive age are iron-deficient – almost tenfold the proportion of iron-deficient men (3.5 per cent), according to an analysis of ABS data.

“It’s sexist. There’s no way around it,” said one pathology service employee not authorised to speak publicly.

Hamad said, “people will say, well, the World Health Organisation used 15 μg/L as the lower threshold. But WHO uses 15 [μg/L] for all adults and has to cater for services operating in some very limited-resource countries, so why are pathology services cherry-picking 15 for women and 30 for men?”

Chief medical officer for major pathology provider Douglass Hanly Moir, Adjunct Professor Annabelle Farnsworth told this masthead that after months of discussion, its laboratories will stop using 15μg/L as the cut-off for females, and instead use 30μg/L for all adults from September.

“It is completely the right thing to do,” Farnsworth said.

A spokesperson for SydPath, which also uses the lower floor for females, said its ferritin range was under review and its ranges would be updated to align with the RCPA’s.

Lifeblood’s medical director of pathology services Dr James Daly said the service was in the planning stages of changing the lower ferritin threshold for female donors to 30μg/L.

Research analysing other markers of iron deficiency suggests that even 30μg/L is too low.

The gold standard (but invasive) test that involves using a blue stain to visualise iron stores in bone marrow indicates 50 to 100 μg/L is the “sweet spot”, Hamad said.

‘Is this just in my head?’

It would take almost two years, countless doctors’ appointments, and the intervention of her father before Kate Burns was diagnosed with the condition for which she had all the hallmarks. Iron deficiency was just the precursor.

Burns was a 21-year-old with a deep trust in healthcare professionals when she started to believe that she might be a hypochondriac.

She had intense, almost constant headaches, waves of fatigue and extreme dizziness.

“My reflux was so severe I couldn’t lie flat. I had to prop up one end of my bed with chunks of wood,” Burns said.

The talented lacrosse player who had travelled solo overseas could no longer stay awake for the train ride to her university, walk upstairs without feeling dizzy and breathless, or keep up with her coursework. She was in almost constant pain and had lost an alarming amount of weight from her already slight frame.

But when her CT scan came back clear, her doctor intimated that she was exaggerating her symptoms, Burns recalled.

She told two GPs that the medication they had prescribed for reflux wasn’t working after several weeks of persisting.

The first doctor told her that she was overreacting, the second diagnosed her with anxiety and suggested she take antianxiety medication.

“I just burst into tears,” Burns said. “I went away questioning my sense of reality.”

When her blood test results showed her ferritin level was 6μg/L, indicating iron deficiency, her doctor told her to take iron tablets, but they exacerbated her reflux and nausea, and caused severe gut pain, Burns said.

“I’d been so unwell for a year now, and no one was listening to me,” Burns said.

“I was this shell of a human being … I would describe how drastically my life had changed to doctors, and it didn’t make any difference.”

Research analysing the use of iron supplements shows that by the time clinicians tell women to take them it’s often too late.

“We know it’s poorly absorbed, so we advise them to take it on an empty stomach and every day. That just increases gastrointestinal side effects, reduces compliance and sets it up for failure,” Clarke said.

Meanwhile, some iron supplements marketed as causing fewer side effects don’t contain enough absorbable iron to be effective, Hamad said.

“This annoys me because it’s a waste of money, generally for women, and a form of financial toxicity,” she said.

Kate Burns’ father, Mark, recalls her asking: “Dad, is this just in my head?”

“I would say, ‘What are you talking about, Kate? No, you’re unwell, look at you’,” he said.

“Seeing her world crumble … as a father, it tore me to pieces.”

He described coming home one evening to find his daughter deeply distraught and in pain.

“I said, ‘That’s it. I’m coming with you to the doctor’,” he said. “We saw a new GP and I insisted on some blood tests.”

Her ferritin was again 6μg/L. Further tests confirmed coeliac disease – a common cause of iron deficiency. Her body was not absorbing iron, calcium and other essential nutrients from her food.

Burns’ GP told her to stop eating gluten, take iron tablets, and directed her to a coeliac disease information website.

She discovered on her own that she needed an endoscopy to confirm the coeliac diagnosis and a bone density scan to assess the damage.

It took Burns two years to convince a doctor to prescribe an iron infusion – the most effective treatment for replenishing iron stores.

“They would just push the iron supplements” that only exacerbated her symptoms, she said.

Mark Burns can’t help but wonder whether Kate could have been spared the ongoing anguish of multiple autoimmune conditions triggered by her untreated coeliac disease if her doctors had intervened earlier.

“She has lost so much in her life,” he said.

From iron flood to a pregnant pause

Heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB) is considered the leading cause of iron deficiency. Defined as excessive menstrual blood loss which interferes with the woman’s physical, emotional, social and/or material quality of life, occurring alone or with other symptoms, it affects about one in four women of reproductive age.

Every month, these women lose a flood of blood (and iron) that seeps through their clothes or multiple forms of sanitary products, and pass clots larger than a 50-cent coin.

Studies suggest up to 60 per cent of women with HMB have severe iron deficiency, and half have not seen a doctor about it. No underlying cause (such as polyps, fibroids, adenomyosis, uterine or blood disorders) is found in about half of the cases investigated.

“These are staggering statistics,” said Uppal, who is also co-vice president of the Bleed Better initiative that helps co-ordinate the International Heavy Menstrual Bleeding Day (May 11). It aims to destigmatise HMB and raise awareness about available treatments.

“This is clearly a huge unmet clinical need and a public health issue,” Uppal said of the underdiagnosed condition.

Iron infusion is recognised as the most effective treatment for replenishing iron. But using iron infusion to treat pregnant women without anaemia is a contentious issue among obstetricians and gynaecologists. A lack of robust research underpins this.

Estimates suggest as many as 70 per cent of pregnant women in their third trimester are iron-deficient. Pregnant women need an additional 1 gram of iron throughout their pregnancy.

“You have some obstetricians who underplay the role of iron deficiency and are only interested once the woman becomes anaemic, and screening for iron deficiency is not uniform,” Clarke said.

The reluctance to use iron infusions is “a historic hangover”, Hamad said, “from decades ago, when there were problems with preparations, including allergic reactions, and the culture carried through to today”.

Dr Nisha Khot, president-elect of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said the vast majority of obstetricians and gynaecologists recognise iron deficiency and will treat it.

“[But] it’s very hard to tease out whether they are caused by iron deficiency or if they are feeling this way because they are pregnant,” Khot said.

The scarcity of access to infusions and the common side effects of oral iron supplements (particularly for pregnant women) make managing iron deficiency very challenging, she said.

“It’s an issue of rationing,” Khot said. “We can’t provide everyone with an iron infusion as and when they need it.

“Within public hospitals, you can often say: ‘yes, this pregnant person needs an iron infusion’, but there just isn’t the capacity to give them [one] in a timely manner in all cases.”

Clarke, Hamad and Uppal were involved in the development of an unendorsed consensus statement to address the issue of untreated iron deficiency in pregnancy.

The statement recommends:

• All pregnant women should be offered a blood test to check their iron and a full blood count in early pregnancy and again at 24 to 28 weeks.
• Women with ferritin levels below 30μg/L should first be offered oral iron supplements.
• Women in the second and third trimester who are low in iron, can’t tolerate oral iron or have tried without improving, should be offered an iron infusion.

Khot said most obstetricians would feel uncomfortable giving pregnant women an iron infusion after only four to six weeks of taking supplements.

Iron infusions come with a risk – though very rare – of anaphylactic reaction, she said, as well as skin staining (a brown iron mark if the cannula is incorrectly inserted).

“What we want is some clear guidance on how to diagnose and manage iron deficiency,” Khot said.

It all adds up

Iron infusions can also be prohibitively expensive. There is no Medicare subsidy. Patients pay $200 to $700 per treatment if they can’t get a referral to the limited public hospital infusion services.

At Dr Rebekah Hoffman’s general practice in Sydney, about 90 per cent of iron infusion patients are females, from teenagers through to pregnant and perimenopausal women.

“Most of our patients have heavy menstrual bleeding. They literally bleed out their iron every single month, so much so that their bodies are just not able to keep up,” said Hoffman, who is the NSW and ACT chair of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP).

Hoffman’s patients pay $200 to $300 out of pocket for an infusion every two to three years.

“That adds up,” she said. “There needs to be improved funding to cover iron infusions, whether that be for GPs, for hospitals, for outpatient care or for private hospitals.”

The RACGP has been lobbying the federal government to introduce a $200 rebate for iron infusions.

In response to questions from this masthead, Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said he had asked the Medical Services Advisory Committee to look at a Medicare item for iron infusions in general practice.

“The Albanese government is tackling sex and gender bias in the health system and improving health outcomes, particularly for women at greater risk of poor health,” Butler said in a statement.

“Women have asked government to take their healthcare seriously, and we have listened,” he said.

Here is the link:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/gaslit-dismissed-and-treated-as-hypochondriacs-the-gender-divide-in-iron-deficiency-20250729-p5mioa.html

It is amazing this is ever missed given the suffering it can cause and how easy it is to correct!

My advice, If a women looks even a little pale or lacks good exercise tolerance just check here Hb!

You can be a hero!

David.

Only A Very Few Are Left From Those That Finally Got Rid Of Adolf Hitler And His Evil Henchman.

It is just over 80 years ago that the world saw the end of Hitler and the Nazis

Here is a brief reminder

Mein Kampf made depravity the highest form of morality: Hitler’s ‘Nazi bible’ a playbook for hate

Henry Ergas

16 August 2025

A picture-illustration showing Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1932 and his book, Mein Kampf. During WWII Hitler wore a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, highlighting his affinity with the ‘grunts’ on the line. Picture: Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images

When Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published exact­ly 100 years ago, the reviews were scathing. The reader, proclaimed the Frankfurter Zeitung, could draw from the book one conclusion and one conclusion only: that Hitler was finished. The influential Neue Zurcher Zeitung was no kinder, lambasting “the sterile rumination of an agitator who is incapable of rational thought and has lost his grip on reality”.

As for Karl Kraus, the great Austrian essayist and critic, he famously dismissed it, quipping: “When I think of Hitler, nothing comes to mind.”

But while the book that would become known as “the Nazi bible” was hardly an immediate bestseller, it was far from being a dismal flop. By the end of 1925, nearly 10,000 copies had been sold, necessitating a second print run, and monthly sales seemed to be trending up. Even more consequentially, Mein Kampf, with its comprehensive elaboration of the Nazi world view, proved instrumental in consolidating Hitler’s until then tenuous position as the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) or NSDAP. Both Hitler and Max Amann, who ran the Nazis’ publishing house, had good reason to be pleased.

After all, the initial circumstances of the book’s production were scarcely promising. When Hitler arrived at Landsberg prison in November 1923, following the failure of a farcically mismanaged putsch, he was assessed by the staff psychologist as “hysterical” and suicidal. However, having determined to end it all by embarking on a hunger strike, he sat down to write his valedictory statement – and with the full support of the prison’s director, a Nazi sympathiser who was happy to accommodate his every need, the project soon expanded, until the writing came to consume Hitler’s days.

Once Emil Georg, a director of the powerful Deutsche Bank and generous funder of the NSDAP, provided the aspiring writer with a top-of-the-line Remington typewriter, a writing table and all the stationery he required, Hitler’s new career as an author – the profession he proudly declared on his 1925 tax return – was well and truly under way.

The difficulty, however, was that Hitler wrote very much as he spoke. Page after page required substantial editing, if not complete revision. Some of it was undertaken by Rudolf Hess, who had a university degree, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German-American Harvard graduate. But many of the most difficult sections were eventually worked over by the unlikely duo of a music critic, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and Bernhard Stempfle, a priest.

The greatest tensions arose in settling the title. Hitler, with his habitual grandiloquence, had called it Four and a Half Years of Battling Lies, Stupidity and Betrayal. Convinced that title would doom it to failure, Amann adamantly insisted on, and seems to have devised, a shorter alternative. Thus was Mein Kampf, the name that would go down in history, born.

Mein Kampf’s singular lack of focus proved tobe a strength.

Viewed superficially, the text, despite its editors’ best efforts, seems inchoate, veering across a bewildering range of grievances, pseudo-historical accounts and exhortations. Yet its singular lack of focus proved to be a strength. It meant there was something in it for each of the social groups the Nazis were attempting to mobilise, with every one of those groups finding the real or imagined harms that afflicted it covered in its pages. And whenever they were discussed, each group’s darkest nightmares were portrayed in striking, often lurid terms.

Hitler himself explained his approach in the book’s discussion of propaganda.

“Most people,” Hitler said, “are neither professors nor university graduates. They find abstract ideas hard to understand. As a result, any successful propaganda must limit itself to a very few points and to stereotypical formulations that appeal to instincts and feelings, making those abstract ideas vividly comprehensible.”

That is exactly what Mein Kampf set out to do – and it did so by hammering three basic themes: that the Germans were victims; that the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews; and that only a fight to the death against “world Jewry” could bring Germany’s redemption and return it to the pre-eminence that was its birthright and historic destiny.

What gave the book its resonance was that each of those themes was well and truly in the air. Nowhere was that clearer than in respect of victimhood.

Thus, the end of World War I had not been viewed in Germany as a military defeat. Rather, the widespread perception, vigorously propagated by General Erich Ludendorff, was that had the German army, which retained undisputed mastery over its home soil, not been “sabotaged” by liberals, freemasons, social democrats and communists, it would have held out, forcing the Allies to a settlement.

Key themes in Mein Kampf was that the Germans were victims and the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews.

The capitulation was, in other words, the result of a “stab in the back” that treacherously delivered the nation to the harsh, grotesquely unjust, treatment eventually meted out at Versailles by the war’s victors.

Closely associated with the resulting sense of unfairness, and of an undeserved defeat, was the smouldering resentment felt by returning soldiers.

World War I had ushered in the glorification of the rank and file, expressed in countries such as France, Britain and Australia by the erection of national memorials for the Unknown Soldier. Here was a figure that represented both the individual and the mass: sanctified by the nation, the Unknown Soldier also stood for the multitudes sent out to die and too quickly forgotten.

That was the case almost everywhere – but not in the newly established Weimar Republic. Unlike its counterparts, the republic erected no national monument, created no worthy memorial: the ghosts of the dead were left unburied.

Moreover, unable to deal with the trauma of the war, the republic accorded veterans no special status: even when their wounds made them entirely disabled, they were entitled only to the paltry benefits accorded to others suffering from similar levels of disability.

With the country’s new leaders abandoning those who had borne so many risks and so much pain on Germany’s behalf, an unbridgeable cleavage opened up between “those who had been there” – with all of their rage and frustration, fury and disillusionment – and those who had not. It is therefore no accident that both for innumerable forgotten soldiers and for the families who had lost their sons and fathers, Hitler, who had lived through the carnage, came to symbolise the unknown soldier of World War I.

Nor is it an accident that during World War II he always donned a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, thereby highlighting his unshakeable affinity with the “grunts” on the line.

The last, but perhaps most broadly felt, source of the sense of victimhood was the devastation wreaked by the “great inflation”.

The immediate effect of the price hikes, which began in 1921, accelerated in late 1922 and became a hyperinflation (that is, one involving monthly price increases of more than 50 per cent) in 1923 was to obliterate the savings of skilled workers, pensioners and the middle class. No less important, however, it also shattered those groups’ social standing which, in a society still geared to honour and respectability, relied on the ability to conspicuously maintain a dignified lifestyle appropriate for one’s status. Instead, for the first time in their lives, previously comfortable professionals, foremen and highly trained workers were reduced to a struggle of all against all, as they vainly attempted to sell once prized, often hard-earned assets that had suddenly – and mysteriously – become utterly valueless.

And as well as leaving a legacy of trauma, that experience created an enduring sense of unpredictability, casting the new republic as incapable of maintaining intact even the elementary foundations of daily life.

Stefan Zweig was therefore not exaggerating when he wrote, in his The World of Yesterday, that “nothing ever embittered the German people so much, nothing made them so furious with hate as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it was, had yet yielded hours of jubilation, with ringing of bells and fanfares of victory. And, being an incurably militaristic nation, Germany felt lifted in her pride by her temporary victories. But the inflation served only to make it feel soiled, cheated, and humiliated. A whole, scarred, generation could never forget or forgive.”

But where there are victims there must be victimisers – and Hitler delivered those too. Towering among them were the Jews.

Mein Kampf’s obsession with Jews is readily demonstrated: including cognate terms, such as Jewry, the 466 references to Jews in the book outnumber those to every other substantive term, including race (mentioned 323 times), Germany (306), war (305) and Marxism, which gets a paltry 194 – still ahead of national socialism and national socialists which, taken together, are referenced only 65 times.

It is certainly true that there is, in those obsessive references, virtually nothing original. Hitler’s tir­ades largely reassemble the anti-Semitic tropes that had emerged in the late 19th century and that were widely disseminated in a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But Hitler’s formulation, while substantively irrational, was arguably more logical than most in the way it combined and superimposed elements from conventional anti-Semitism, pseudo-biology and social Darwinism.

glory and greatness began to emerge. Hitler with Nazi officials in Munich in the summer of 1939, just before the start of WWII.

Thus, relying on a loose biological metaphor, it defined Jews as a parasite – but as one that had deliberate agency and that consciously (and collectively) sought to infect its victims, notably the “purer”, more advanced “races”.

Second, it asserted that the resulting infection was not only fatal to its victims but ultimately to their entire “race”.

Third, it projected on to that account the image of a Darwinian struggle that had been fought across recorded history’s entire course, between Jews on the one hand and the superior races on the other: a struggle that could end only with the extinction of the Jews or their adversaries.

And finally, it argued that, unless anti-Semites learnt to display the same degree of ruthlessness, the same insistence on ethnic loyalty, the same stealth and the same forms of manipulation of media and the public sphere, the Jews stood every chance of triumphing because they entirely lacked ethical standards, were exceptionally cunning, ambitious, aggressive and vindictive and – last but not least – had a natural bond to each other, combined with a murderous hatred of others.

The resulting portrayal of Jews was as terrifying as it was bizarre. Jews, it seemed, were chameleons, who were both subhuman yet extraordinarily capable, both fanatical Bolsheviks and natural capitalists, both physically repulsive yet immensely able to seduce and “infect” innocent Aryan maidens.

Moreover, they could shift effortlessly and surreptitiously from any one of those myriad shapes into any another, choosing whatever form was most likely to succeed in destroying their opponent.

As the great German philosopher Ernst Cassirer later recalled, he and his other Jewish friends found those claims “so absurd, so ridiculous, and so crazy, that we had trouble taking them seriously”. But others did not have any difficulty in doing so.

Many forces were at work. Some resulted from the war years. For example, the terrible food shortages caused by the British blockade (which was lifted only two years after the war ended) had resulted in spiralling prices for basics on the black market – with the finger being readily, although entirely incorrectly, pointed at alleged hoarding by Jews.

And more indirectly, but no less potently, the horrific second wave of the 1919 influenza pandemic, in which 400,000 Germans died, had given enormous prominence to notions of infection and contagion. As careful statistical studies subsequently showed, that prominence had enduring effects, as the Nazis secured significantly greater electoral support in the worst affected areas than in those where the death toll was lower.

But by far the greatest factor was the profound disruption of the post-war years, when everything Germans had taken as solid melted into thin air, leaving a pervasive feeling of bewilderment.

For all of its myriad flaws, the Kaiserreich, as the German Empire was known, had exuded a stability that made the future predictable. Now, with one seemingly incomprehensible event piling up on top of another, the desperate search to make sense of the world triggered an equally desperate search for someone to blame.

That was precisely what Hitler’s vast Jewish conspiracy offered. Mein Kampf, Heinrich Himmler pithily noted, was “a book that explains everything”. If it was so effective, Hannah Arendt later reflected, it was because its playing on tropes and stereotypes that were relatively familiar could, at least superficially, “fulfil this longing for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense”. All of a sudden, things fell into place – with consequences for Europe’s Jews that would forever sully Germany’s name.

If those horrendous conse­quences eventuated, it was because Mein Kampf did not only identify an alleged disease; it also set out a path to national redemption. In that respect, too, its main points were entirely unoriginal.

However, what was relatively new, and especially important, was the unadulterated celebration of death and violence in which they were couched.

Whether Hitler called for Jews to be massacred is a matter of interpretation. What is beyond any doubt is that he came as close to it as one possibly could. The Jews, he claimed, would “accentuate the struggle to the point of the hated adversary’s bloody extermination”. As that happened, it would be absolutely impossible to defeat them “without spilling their blood”. And when it came to that, their opponents, locked “in a titanic struggle”, would have to “send to Lucifer” – that is, to hell – “those who had mounted an assault on the skies”: that is, the Jews.

There would be, in the process, countless victims; but the Aryans who perished would be martyrs, “acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator”, and like Hitler himself “fighting for the work of the Lord”.

As with so much of Mein Kampf, the sheer violence of those calls, and of the text more generally, fell on fertile ground, again especially among veterans.

If those veterans had one thing in common it was the experience of “total war”, characterised by the ever-growing porousness of the boundaries between soldiers and civilians both as combatants and as targets of destruction.

Once they got to the front, it did not take long for ordinary soldiers to discard the fantasies of splendid bayonet charges across fields of flowers. Instead, burrowed underground in trenches filled with slime and excrement, rats and rotting body parts, what many learnt was that life was war, and war was life.

And at least for some, the sacrifice and devotion of their comrades also taught that violence brought out the best qualities in man.

Rendering that habituation to violence even more extreme was the experience of the 5 per cent or so of German soldiers who volunteered for Freikorps (Free Corps) units that fought, from 1918 to 1923, against the wave of revolutionary movements throughout central and eastern Europe.

Particularly in the Baltic states, those struggles were brutally uncompromising, with mass executions not only of adversaries but also of entire villages of helpless Jews. It was in those struggles that many ingredients of Nazism were forged – its symbols, like the death’s head and the swastika; its core staff, who later largely comprised the leading personnel first of the Nazi’s paramilitary units and then of the SS; and the unbridled anti-Semitic savagery of its killing squads. To all those who lived through those struggles, Mein Kampf seemed to perfectly capture their world view.

But Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial, too. Yes, Germany experienced the aftermath of World War I as an unmitigated disaster. Yet, from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. When the war finally ended, the survivors could not but feel an urge to endow it with meaning – with the hope that the countless deaths would be redeemed by creating a better future, not only for themselves but also for the nation, a future shorn of the causes of everything that had gone wrong.

And no one, in the chaos and misery of post-World War I Germany, painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler.

Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s jail ensured that the 20th century’s fields of glory would be sown with the corpses of innocent victims and the distorted fragments of shattered ideals.

Between those dates, the book’s fortunes closely tracked those of its author. After the crash of 1929, and the onset of the Depression, sales boomed; and once the Nazi regime was in place it became ubiquitous. A second volume had appeared in December 1926; it was added to the 400 pages of the first in 1930.

To cope with the length, the combined book was printed on extremely fine paper, exactly like a bible. Soon after that, an ever-wider range of formats – going from cheap paperback versions to extremely luxurious versions bound in leather – was offered to readers.

The regime recommended that municipalities give a good quality copy to newly married couples as they stepped out of the wedding ceremony; estimates vary but it seems two million couples benefited (if that is the right word). The book also became the standard prize in schools, workplaces and party organisations, bestowed on recipients with all the pomp the Fuhrer’s great work demanded. Altogether, by the “Zero Hour”, 12.5 million copies had found their way into the hands of potential readers – yielding Hitler copyright payments, partly deposited in a Swiss bank account, that made him an extremely wealthy man.

How many Germans actually read it is hard to say; the answers given to immediate post-war surveys were understandably evasive. What seems likely, however, is that its influence came less from the scrupulous consumption of the “Nazi bible” than from short excerpts, read out at meetings and over the radio or printed near the mastheads of major papers, as well as from the million or so copies of “reader’s digest”-like variants sold during the Reich’s golden years.

In the chaos and misery of post-WWI Germany, no one painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler

But its greatest impact was almost certainly indirect. Regardless of what ordinary Germans may or may not have done, abundant evidence shows it was carefully studied and frequently consulted by the Nazi leadership. The regime’s core principle, the so-called Fuhrerprinzip, specified that “what the Fuhrer says is law”: but what the Fuhrer had actually said, and even more so, what he wanted, was almost always hopelessly unclear – yet entire careers depended on guessing it accurately.

As a result, the everyday life of the Nazi hierarchy’s upper echelons was consumed in a competi­tion to “work towards the Fuhrer”, as Hitler’s great biographer, Ian Kershaw, called it: that is, in trying to anticipate the Fuhrer’s will and show that no one could be more ruthless or determined in putting it into effect. It was in that process that Mein Kampf was absolutely fundamental, invariably referred to and systematically used.

And it was through that process that Hitler’s words made depravity the highest form of morality, atrocity the surest sign of heroism, and genocide the key to redemption.

Outside Germany, very few grasped that those horrors would unfold. Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and David Ben-Gurion were among those few, carefully annotating early versions and gasping at the book’s implications.

But their warnings were ignored because Mein Kampf was plainly the work of a madman. As the British Labour Party’s leading intellectual, Harold Laski, said, when he was asked why he dismissed it, rational men and women “could not bring themselves to contemplate such a world”, much less believe that “any child of the twentieth century” would regard it as a realistic possibility.

But the Nazi art of politics, as Joseph Goebbels concisely defined it, consisted precisely in making the impossible possible and the absolutely inconceivable a practical reality. That art did not disappear with Nazism’s demise, nor did the murderous anti-Semitism whose seeds Hitler sowed a century ago.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/mein-kampf-made-depravity-the-highest-form-of-morality-hitlers-nazi-bible-a-playbook-for-hate/news-story/47043792d33d2366dd7ad36e835c50e5

None should forget just how evil his and his followers were and how wonderful is that he and the Nazis were defeated after 5 terrible years. My father told me that for the first few years of WWII it was no sure thing that he would be defeated and that until the USA and the Russians got organized and involved it was a close run thing! Something as evil could return so we need to stay alert to such evil ideologies and risks.

David.

It Really Is Not Good Enough That Private Health insurance Costs Are So Complicated!

This appeared earlier today!

Medicare levy surcharge payers almost quadruple in six years

Anthony Keane

17 August, 2025

More Australians are paying extra tax through the Medicare levy surcharge, potentially wasting their money.

The latest Australian Taxation Office figures show a sharp rise in taxpayers hit by the surcharge, which is between 1 and 1.5 per cent extra tax on their income above a certain threshold if they do not have private hospital insurance.

It can be cheaper for singles and families to buy private hospital cover, although experts say the lowest-cost policies offer very little value.

Rising wages have meant the Medicare levy surcharge now kicks in at a level below the nation’s average full-time wage of $102,632, and the new ATO data shows 768,537 individuals paid a surcharge averaging $1318 in the 2022-23 financial year.

That was an annual increase of 25 per cent, while the number of payers has almost quadrupled in six years, from 196,807 in 2017.

For 2025-26, a Medicare levy of 1 per cent is payable by singles earning above $101,000 a year and couples earning above $202,000, and rises to 1.5 per cent for individuals and couples on more than $158,000 and $316,000, respectively. Families with children have slightly higher thresholds.

Hospital cover is needed to avoid the Medicare levy surcharge. Picture: iStock

Tribeca Financial chief executive Ryan Watson said Australians’ average incomes had increased dramatically over the past six years.

“This puts a lot of people above the surcharge threshold, thus a lot more people are duty-bound to pay it,” he said.

Mr Watson said people should do some research to understand if they were paying the surcharge.

“We suggest all of our clients have private health insurance for a number of reasons, not least to avoid paying another government levy or surcharge.”

H&R Block director of tax communications Mark Chapman said he suspected more people were choosing to pay the surcharge because “the cost of health insurance is so expensive”.

“The issue with hospital cover is although it might be sufficient to avoid the Medicare levy surcharge, it might not be sufficient to provide a level of cover that you actually expect,” he said.

Research shows basic hospital cover – the minimum to avoid the tax – starts at about $100 a month, but for higher-level “silver” hospital cover, average monthly costs are about $300-$400 for families and $160 for singles.

Mr Chapman said health fund members might be horrified to discover the long list of exclusions on basic hospital policies, and some “are not worth the paper it’s written on”.

Government figures show about 12.3 million Australians have private hospital cover.

Compare the Market economic director David Koch said people could be stung by the Medicare levy surcharge without knowing.

“Even when your salary does go up and you’re bumped over the threshold, your employer probably isn’t going to let you know … for a lot of people, the first time they’ll hear about the Medicare levy surcharge is when they start their tax return.”

Compare the Market makes money by referring to customers to partnered health funds.

“You pay the MLS every day during a financial year that you don’t hold private hospital cover,” Mr Koch said.

“That means you can’t just wait until tax time or the very last minute to take out cover to avoid the tax – if you want to avoid MLS entirely, you must cover for each day of the financial year.”

To avoid the surcharge, for singles, appropriate hospital cover must have an excess of $750 or less, while for couples the excess must be $1500 or less, comparison website iSelect’s spokeswoman Sophie Ryan said. Like Compare the Market, iSelect is paid by the private health insurance providers it refers customers to.

“In some cases, Aussies mistakenly believe extras-only policies exempt them from the MLS,” she said. “Many may be caught out because they assume extras-only cover is enough to avoid the surcharge, which it’s not.”

Analysis by iSelect found the average monthly premium for a basic hospital-only policy was $98.36. “There may be a small cost difference between paying the additional tax or taking out a level of hospital cover which may provide significant benefit should you experience a health issue in the future,” Ms Ryan said.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/wealth/personal-finance/medicare-levy-surcharge-payers-almost-quadruple-in-six-years/news-story/295b2b5d543851d02ce6a00305edbf1f

To me this is a decision we all have to make (how much etc.) and then keep and eye on to make sure it is not going up unnoticed, and we are getting value for money! What you need to  pay varies throughout life and your coverage needs to be adjusted to suit. Well worth seeking advice if unsure...

David.