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Is the Internet Your Source of Knowledge?
serutan asks: "How much do you rely on the Internet for information? Since getting online 7 or 8 years ago, I have gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news and information, to the point where they've pretty much disappeared from my life. I'm a geek, but at age 49 not exactly a child of the Information Age. I've been surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopedias and similar books for most of my life. I still read fiction in book form, but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look. This realization seems sort of stunning. I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject."
great website for information
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
We refer to it as "the source of all Truth and Knowledge." (I am not making this up.)
We never use the phone book... We never call anyone to make travel arrangements... We never write checks and mail them to pay bills...
I often wonder how anybody did anything prior to the advent of "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Dead Trees are NOT just the way to be... ...at least in the medical professions.
Several medical studies have shown that physicians that use medical online databases such as UpToDate, provide better patient care. The medical literature changes so quickly that many books are outdated before they are released to the public.
In residency it was amazing how many "rare" diagnoses were made based on the ability to quickly look up a condition or situation on an online database. Plus, if you can't find it in uptodate or similar online consult references, you can always access PUBMED and review all the medical journals for the latest and greatest information on a disease process.
If you are a patient, you want your doctor going to the online databases and journals for information...
Davak
If you actually visit a hospital and work with doctors and nurses on a daily basis, you will see that those who are not currently doing pure research work, but instead clinical work, are constantly in contact with patients or administering the programs they work with. Doctors and nurses are acutely involved in the care of patients spend a huge amount of time with them. Having one doctor take on five times as many patients is not going to work simply because he has access to an online database. In fact, there has been research done, especially after mortality rates increase in individual hospitals in an effort to improve the care given at those hospitals, which shows that as the number of patients each nurse is responsible for increases, the mortality rate increases by double-digit percentages, especially in ICUs.
You seem to be greatly confused about just how weighed down with information doctors and nurses are; doctors, for one, go to school that long for a reason. The human body is a very large and complex set of systems that isn't easily mastered. It's simple to sit at a terminal and type in a list of symptoms; it's quite another thing to know how the diagnosis pertains to the patient, whether or not the diagnosis is correct, and how the treatment will affect the patient. Doctors aren't simple databases that accept symptoms and wads of cash as an input and spit out diagnoses and treatments.
You betray your own argument with this line, as well:
By removing doctors to increase their bottom line, wouldn't they then still be charging the same, or at least a similar, amount? You state that "technology," this magical panacea, will cause the demand for doctors to go down (wrong, because care-provider to patient ratios are definitely linked to the health of patients), and again cause the salaries for existing doctors to go down (in some weird scenario of yours, because it seems to me that when a field becomes more specialized, the salaries of the specialists goes up), which will drive down the demand for medical education (which doesn't make sense either because of the above and because people enter health care, every now and then, out of the pure pleasure of helping others, not out of obligation), which will drive down the price (which again doesn't make sense because universities are either private or public: public tuition rates generally do not fluctuate in that manner, and private schools are going to charge private school costs, the same as they always have; you don't think that Art History majors pay significantly less than Biology/Pre-Med majors at private schools, do you? Why then would the cost of post-grad private education go down?). If what you say is true and those costs do go down and the hospitals do remove doctors, how can they increase their bottom line by any way except charging more than the care costs?
It seems to me that what you're saying is it's the insurance companies and the health care institutions that are over-charging and that they will continue to do that no matter what happens with the number of docs out there. So who's to blame? The doctor who puts in 80 hour weeks and has to juggle 20 patients a day, and as a reward for improving the health of people is given the opportunity to own a Porsche, or the executive of a health insurance company who said little Jimmy couldn't get the liver transplant he needs to survive because mommy's health plan doesn't cover that, and is given the opportunity to own a Porshe a
Another invaluable resource for physics and some other hard sciences (I believe, as I only have first hand experience with physics) is The Web of Science (yes sort of a lame name), which is so superior to SCIDEX indicies it makes them almost laughable.
Unfortunately this service comes at a very steep price from what I've been told, and as such is only available to institutions willing to cover that cost (though most moderate sized and larger universities will have a subscription).
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