The opening quote by Alexandra Adams, the first deaf-blind medical student in the United Kingdom, is a response to naysayers on her decision to join medicine. The cover page of this issue of IJME also highlights the underrepresented in medicine portraying a healthcare professional with an acquired visual impairment who works with full professional rigour and dedication.Everyone wants a healthy baby. No sane person sets out to have a sick or disabled child. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/Avasimibe(CI-1011).html It is the duty and joy of healthcare to help to increase the chances of a happy event. Until delivery, healthcare must do its utmost to decrease the risk of a sick child or a child with a disability being born.In his recent Comment in IJME, Dr Breimer casts disability advocates as "special interest groups" and pits them against the abstracted concept of "women's autonomy." Against this, we assert that, far from only being a conflict of interest category, disability activism related to prenatal screening and testing is a robust part of bioethical debate and scholarship. Here, we disagree with Dr Breimer's characterisation of Non-invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) related disability activism as a threat to women's autonomy and respond to the underlying assumptions of his claims. We argue that disability need not be equated only with harm. Instead, we point out the dominant and intractable belief that disability is something to be avoided, which may lead to belief-based moral wrongs. This is the position from which disability activists make claims about the need to expand understandings of disability. Drawing on existing evidence, we find that prenatal testing does not automatically facilitate autonomy, and that NIPT may be even more of a challenge to autonomy than previous testing iterations. We suggest that NIPT should continue to be a phenomenon under close clinical scrutiny, and that ongoing debates and multiple claims-making can only add to our understanding of this phenomenon.India's Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995 (PWD Act, 1995) mandated a minimum enrollment reservation of 3% for persons with disability (PwDs) across all educational courses supported by government funding. Following this, the Indian Nursing Council (INC) issued regulations limiting such an enrollment quota to PwDs with lower limb locomotor disability ranging between 40%-50%. The Medical Council of India (MCI) also restricted admissions under the PwD category to PwDs with a lower limb locomotor disability to comply with the Act. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016, which replaced the PwD Act, 1995, raised the minimum reservation to 5% for all government-funded institutions of higher education and extended this reservation to PwDs under 21 different clinical conditions, rather than the seven conditions included under the PwD Act, 1995. Following the enactment of the RPwD Act, 2016, the MCI issued regulations that allowed PwDs with locomotor disability and those with a few other types of disabilities in the range of 40%-80%, to pursue graduate and postgraduate medical courses, while the INC has not made any changes. This article addresses the complexities of inclusion of PwDs in the healthcare workforce, offers suggestions for inclusive measures; and compares the INC admission regulation released in 2019 to the MCI 2019 admission guidelines for graduate and postgraduate medical courses.Some doctors with severe congenital colour vision deficiency (CCVD) may experience difficulty in colour discrimination that can affect their decision-making. In the absence of evidence-based guidelines, learners with CCVD are arbitrarily debarred from specialising in some disciplines. This cross-sectional, anonymous, questionnaire-based study asked specialists from all over the country if doctors with CCVD should avoid specialising in their respective disciplines. Of 218 responses, 80 (36.7%) said they should avoid it, citing colour discrimination as critical. The 32 (14.7%) participants who were unsure and 106 (48.6%) who said that CCVD would not be a problem gave reasons that mirrored those in the literature the degree of deficiency is variable; experience helps; automation, history-taking, close observation, good illumination, contrast, touch, and peer-corroboration can reduce dependency on colour. Awareness of the deficiency and finding ways to compensate for it during training may mitigate errors and safeguard patients. Instead of blocking people with CCVD from admission to some specialties, specialists should consider these findings and support learners who are aware of their deficiency and still wish to specialise in a particular discipline.Peter C Gøtzsche and Anders Sørensen in their article titled "Systematic violations of patients' rights and safety Forced medication of a cohort of 30 patients" alleged violation of patient rights by psychiatrists with the use of force, thereby causing immense harm. In this commentary I try to understand their motivation, expose their bias, make an evidence based counterpoint, explore real life consequences of their views and make a case for nuanced discussion on complexities in mental health.In October 2020, the world's three top medical journals, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and Nature denounced, in their editorials, the United States' response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and appealed to US citizens to vote for change (1,2,3). Nature went to the extent of naming the candidate to vote for. The Lancet has a history of making comments and taking positions on political issues. However, what surprised many was the NEJM editorial, signed by several of its editors, taking a partisan political position for the first time since it was established in 1812, 208 years ago (4). These editorials express not only disappointment with the political leadership, but anger against its wilful disregard of science, undermining of services in the public sector and regulatory institutions, gross partisan political interference in science, and so on.Smart textiles provide an opportunity to simultaneously record various electrophysiological signals from the human body, such as ECG, in a non-invasive and continuous manner. Accurate processing of ECG signals recorded using textile sensors is challenging due to the very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Signal processing algorithms that can extract ECG signal out of textile-based electrode recordings, despite low SNR are needed. Presently, there are no textile ECG datasets available to develop, test and validate these algorithms. In this paper we attempted to model textile ECG signals by adding the textile sensor noise to open access ECG signals. We employed the linear predictive coding method to model different features of this noise. By approximating the linear predictive coding residual signals using Kernel Density Estimation, an artificial textile ECG noise signal was generated by filtering the residual signal with the linear predictive coding coefficients. The obtained textile sensor noise was added to the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database (MITDB), thus creating Textile-like ECG dataset consisting of 108 channels (30 min each).