Duncan Syme -

Is an experienced physician who currently lives in Victoria, Australia.

He has been in clinical practice for 34 years both here and overseas.

Dr Syme has always approached medicine with a holistic outlook. This stems from a childhood where his parents viewed love, sunshine, nutrition, exercise, good sleep, a positive attitude and purpose in life to be the essential ingredients for good health.

He has a very wide range of clinical experience, from Obstetrics to Plastics to Emergency work.

For the past 10 years, Dr Syme has been working in a large public hospital in their Hospital in the Home program as a consultant. In that role he developed a particular interest in complex wound management, receiving funding to commence a clinical project in which he was the principal investigator of a randomised control trial for a wound healing device.

Developing a clinical experiment from scratch provided him with a good understanding of the ethics approval process for a clinical trial. In addition, he sat on the low-risk ethics committee for the last 2 years reviewing other proposals for clinical studies as well as working for a pharmaceutical company in their pharmacovigilance section monitoring adverse events for clinical trials.

Dr Syme was suspended by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) on February the 17th, 2022. The reason given was failing to follow medical position statement issued by AHPRA and the Medical Board on March 9, 2021 due to giving medical exemptions and writing a supportive letter. This apparently did not follow the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) guidelines.

This was despite using his considerable clinical experience and judgement that this was the most appropriate thing to do in the circumstance.

At this time Australian’s health bureaucracy has deemed Dr Syme to be ‘a danger to the public’, just for standing up for voluntary informed consent, and a patient’s right to bodily autonomy.

He is currently the Vice President of the Australian Medical Professional Society (AMPS), where he works hard to keep the patient Doctor relationship the primary focus of medicine, resist Government overreach, stand up to medical censorship and defend the right of Doctors to treat individual patients as they see fit.