John Dwyer (medicine) Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

Dwyer pressures the government to stop using public funds to support unproven practices. The Australian taxation system provides a rebate to help cover the premiums for people who take out private health insurance. Benefits paid for natural therapies have been increasing rapidly in spite of lack of testing: Choice magazine estimates that over the 10 years to 2015, benefits paid for natural therapies increased 345%. In 2014, after the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) review of global research into homeopathy found it had no efficacy, Dwyer called on the government to stop supporting it financially via the government rebate to private health insurers.

As of 2014, the organisation’s membership included over 1000 doctors, researchers and supporters, including Nobel laureates and three winners of Australian of the Year.

In 2011, Dwyer formed the organization Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM) with a group of Australian doctors, medical researchers and scientists. Dwyer was the inaugural president, a role that he held until early 2019. FSM was formed “to emphasise the importance of having health care in Australia based upon evidence, scientifically sound research and established scientific knowledge.”

In 2011, he organized a group of 34 prominent Australian doctors, medical researchers and scientists who wrote an open letter to Central Queensland University to express their concerns about its plans to teach “alternative medicine” courses as if they were science. They were concerned that this would be misleading to the public, that public money would be wasted, and that it would damage the credibility of Australia’s university system: “such initiatives diminish the academic reputation of participating institutes and Australian science as they give credibility to pseudoscience or blatant anti-science.” Similarly, in The Medical Journal of Australia in February 2014 he argues that the pharmaceutical industry’s growing practice of selling homeopathic and naturopathic preparations, and nutritional supplements, seriously undermines their standing as trusted professionals, and that “one can only imagine that commercial reasons dominate.”

He has been a director of the Prince of Wales Hospital Foundation since 2008. He is the patron of the Foundation’s Nightingale Bequest Society, having previously served as its Chairman, and he is on its Grant Round Committee. His other board appointments include Eastern Sydney Area Health Board, and South-East Sydney Area Health Board.

Dwyer served as Professor and Clinical Dean of the Faculty of Medicine for more than twenty years, until his retirement in 2006. Following his retirement from full-time teaching, he was appointed as an Emeritus Professor at the University of NSW and he is a Director of the Prince of Wales Hospital Foundation.

In 2003, Federal and State governments were negotiating the funding of public hospitals but little attention was paid to non-hospital approaches such as preventive care, early diagnosis, community-based health care, mental health, indigenous health and workforce health. Dwyer pointed out that there are dependencies between these, for example every day the Prince of Wales Hospital was forced to turn away ambulances, because its emergency departments were filled with patients who could not get a bed in a nursing home, or who had no access to a bulk-billing doctor. At the time, Dwyer was chairman of the National Hospitals Clinicians’ task force, and this prompted him to look at options for a more balanced system. He approached other health organisations to form an alliance that could provide a co-ordinated response on major health reform issues. The result was that he founded the Australian Health Care Reform Alliance (AHCRA). The AHCRA aimed to inform the political decision-making process by representing the Australian Medical Association, the Nursing Federation, Catholic Health, the deans of all the medical schools, Access Economics, physicians, surgeons, rural doctors, and consumers.

In 2002, Dwyer chaired the New South Wales Healthcare Complaints and Consumer Protection Advisory Committee (HCCPAC) (informally called the “Quackwatch Committee”), whose objective was to tighten controls on “wonder drugs” and “miracle cures”, and to “combat dodgy cures and health practices”.

In 2000, he was named as the “Skeptic of the Year” by the Australian Skeptics, and in 2012 he again won that award jointly with the other founding members of Friends of Science in Medicine.

Dwyer was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (OA) in 1991, in recognition of his “service to public health, particularly through the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases”.

In 1989, he was a senior adviser to NSW Health Minister Peter Collins and the Chief Health Officer, Sue Morey, during the events where Sharleen Spiteri, an HIV-positive sex worker, was forcibly detained. Dwyer had argued against this course of action, but he lost that argument, stating later that Collins was “quite open about saying that he felt he had to be seen to be being tough … and protecting the community.” Dwyer was then obliged to hold Spiteri in a locked ward in his own hospital unit for a short time. This came to public attention when the television show 60 Minutes featured the controversy. Dwyer went on to found the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific, which still convenes bi-annual international conferences on HIV/AIDS in the Asia Pacific region, becoming its first president.

The moral panic associated with AIDS meant that he also had to deal with political considerations. In 1987 he was a foundation member of the National Advisory Committee on AIDS (NACAIDS), which made a range of recommendations including syringe exchange programs in prisons and not segregating HIV-positive prisoners. These recommendations were not adopted at the time due to their political unpopularity. He emphasised that years of experience in managing HIV/AIDS have confirmed that legislation and policy is most effective when it respects the human rights of the people concerned, especially non-discrimination, equality, and due process.

In 1985 he returned to Australia as Professor of Medicine and Head of the School of Medicine at the University of New South Wales. He was also the Director of Medicine for the University’s major teaching hospital, the combined Prince Henry / Prince of Wales Hospital. At the time, the growth of HIV/AIDS was his major area of research and clinical work, including the introduction of anti-retroviral drugs.

After completing his PhD, Dwyer took up a one-year scholarship at Yale University in the USA. He was offered a Howard Hughes Medical Institute career development award in 1973, and a similar scholarship from the US National Institutes of Health and continued his career in the US. During his 14 years at Yale, he became the Professor of Medicine and Paediatrics, and he was Head of the Department of Clinical Immunology for seven years. During this time AIDS emerged and Dwyer was engaged with the early efforts to identify and treat the disease. He conducted research into the role that T8 cells play in AIDS.

He was awarded a scholarship from the Australian Asthma Foundation to undertake a year of research at Sydney’s Garvan Institute. This experience led him to pursue an academic career. In 1969 he was appointed a Research Fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, where he pursued a PhD in Clinical Immunology from the University of Melbourne. His thesis was entitled “Cellular Interactions with Antigens in the Immune Response”, and he graduated in 1972.

Dwyer married Catherine Thrower in 1966. They have three children: Justin (born 1967), Gabrielle (born 1968), and Christopher (born 1974).

John Michael Dwyer, AO (born 9 September 1939) is an Australian doctor, professor of medicine, and public health advocate. He was originally a Professor of Medicine and Paediatrics, then Head of the Department of Clinical Immunology at Yale University. Returning to Australia, he became Head of the Department of Medicine and the Clinical Dean at the University of New South Wales and Director of Medicine at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital, the University’s major teaching hospital, for over twenty years. In retirement he is an Emeritus Professor of Medicine of the University. He founded the Australian Health Care Reform Alliance, and was the founding president of the Friends of Science in Medicine until 2019. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for his service to public health.

Dwyer was born in Melbourne, Australia on 9 September 1939. He attended St Patrick’s College, Strathfield. He gained his medical degree (MB, BS in Medicine and Surgery) from the University of Sydney, graduating in 1964. He worked as resident and registrar at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP) as a consultant physician in 1968.