We’ve believed for a long time that the developments with the internet and so on in the last 25 – 30 years will give rise to a new type of professional – people who are experts on what’s on the internet in lots of areas, but in none more than on medical and health matters.
They will be highly intelligent, good at communication, with or without medical qualifications, people who are constantly researching what’s on the internet on various subjects, and who make a living, not by helping people like us and our readers with their own expertise on various subjects, but by their expertise on what’s the very best on the internet on these subjects. They will be doing research that, of course, you and we could do, if we had the time, but we are better off paying them to do it for us.
So much on this subject is illustrated by this Dilbert cartoon.
Everything we need to know is already on the internet, and more and more is going to be on the internet. It was recently estimated that more is put up on the internet in two days in 2018 than was put up in a whole year not long ago. But finding it is not always easy – professional help to find it could be invaluable.
And guess who need these people the most? Doctors.
This is illustrated by this.
On the one hand things are being said on the internet about Low Dose Naltrexone that it “may well be the most important therapeutic breakthrough in over fifty years,” and, on the other hand, when one of our readers recently emailed quite a few Sydney Neurologists asking whether “advising on and perhaps prescribing it was within their areas of expertise,” even the few that responded said they didn’t really know much about it!!!!????
We find this extraordinary!!! – Sydney people missing out on perhaps huge benefits they could be deriving from it for want of even one doctor in the whole of Sydney who knows everything there is to know about it.
This, when all that is needed is perhaps even just one person, with medical training or otherwise – with modern communication technology they can be anywhere in the world – who sets out to be constantly searching for the latest and best information on LDN on the internet, that just one Sydney doctor, (and, of course, doctors all round the world,) could be consulting to keep up with the very latest on it.
Another illustration of this.
One of our readers, in a consultation with a geriatrician, when he asked her what she knew about Modafinil, said, “Oh that’s for people who keep dozing off.” A geriatrician, when that’s all she knows about Modafinal!!!!???? This when there are seniors out there who’ve never had the “dozing off” problem in their whole lives, who couldn’t live without it.
It reminds us of a GP who one told us that he thought he was at his peak when he’d been a doctor for 3 years – at this stage he had three years experience as a doctor under his belt, but that, from then on, what he’d learnt in Med School would start to be out-of-date. And that would have been 30 or 40 years ago – how much more would it be so these days when knowledge is increasing so much faster in all fields, and no more so that in the fields of medicine and health.
How much help is there out there for doctors to assist them in ensuring that their knowledge is always up-to-date? We can’t find evidence that there’s much at all. And if doctors are not keeping up-to-date, what chances have the people got, us and our readers, in keeping up-to-date with the very best information on our various personal health and welfare issues.
A 1 Jan 2019 update: Since authoring this post we have come across this South Australian Government initiative which purports to provide support for GPs. And we’ve recently come across another website which purports to do the same, perhaps a better one, – but, for the moment, we’ve mislaid it’s details.
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