Even twenty years ago a doctor’s life was relatively simple. You learnt your medicine in medical school, you trained in hospital and then you went into practice using the knowledge and experience that you had gained. Research happened in medical institutions but the results took a relatively long time to filter down to general practice. Meanwhile, your patients believed what you told them and believed that you knew what you were talking about – and so did you. But, no more…
Simple and reliable solutions – such as antibiotics – are developing cracks and, while extraordinary strides are being made in some areas, a relatively recent spate of autoimmune disorders such as coeliac disease, diabetes, allergies, MS and Parkinson’s disease – not to mention cancer – are defying all attempts to understand, explain or ‘cure’ them.
But whereas, in the old days, such medical confusion would have remained within the medical community and been worried over and worked on far from the gaze of the patient, thanks to the arrival of the internet, any allergy sufferer, diabetic or coeliac can access all of the latest research at the click of a mouse.
In many ways this is excellent and, although care needs to be taken to sift the medical dross from the gold when surfing web, a more medically aware patient is likely to take a more positive and active role in their own healthcare – which has to be good. However, it also means that the medical research which would previously have been sifted and mulled in the privacy of the medical world and only released to the patient when some considered conclusions had been reached, is now accessible to all from the moment it is accepted for publication. The result is a lot of confusing information and advice. For example…
For many years now we have been warned about the dangers of excess exposure to the sun causing skin cancer, so we have all dutifully slathered ourselves and our children with Factor 10,000 sun cream lest a single cancer-causing ray get through. Yet we are now deluged with reports that suggest that a wide range of current health problems, from cancer to SAD, are related to vitamin D deficiency (see our articles and research reports) arising from our lack of exposure to sun, the most powerful source of Vitamin D.
Or…
A recent study, reported in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, reports that Professor Yitzhak Katz at Tel Aviv University has found that feeding infants cow’s milk formula very early in life appears to protect them from developing cow’s milk allergy later. Yet, for the last twenty years, mothers who were even remotely concerned about the possibility of cow’s milk allergy have been told to avoid cow’s milk based formula like the plague.
Or…
The on-going debate as to whether pregnant and breast-feeding mothers should avoid or deliberately eat peanuts if they want to prevent their child developing peanut allergy. This is a horrendously difficult question and one can only sympathise with the doctors struggling to make sense of conflicting evidence. But it does make it extraordinarily difficult for the patient who has now become party to these struggles. So the pregnant mum, turning to the Foods Standards Agency’s excellent allergy website for guidance, now has to plough through a page of Rumsfeldian advice which, if you did not know that it was genuine, you might seriously suspect of being a spoof.
This is not in any way to suggest that the provision of medical information on the internet is a bad thing – merely to reiterate the well known truism that with every solution comes a new problem…