I can’t help but wonder, as I finally begin recovering from three days of acute diarrhoea, whether this recent interest in ehealth has activated some bizarre curse that forces me continually to confront my own state of physical well-being.
It started a few weeks ago, towards the end of a game of Real Tennis – with a GP friend – I suddenly tore my right gastrocnemius. I’ve been hobbling around ever since, wondering when I’m likely to get back on a court.
What fascinates me is the way my behaviour as a patient has changed with the availability of more – and more reliable – information on the Web. The article and illustration from Australian Doctor showed me the difference between the “monkey muscle” that I originally thought was involved, and the gastrocnemius – which is something another GP friend who informed me that the injury I’d suffered wouldn’t repair itself may not have understood. While my recovery hasn’t been particularly speedy, I’m sure it has benefitted from the information I gathered from the Web.
In the second case, by Day Two, I’d looked up the most effective treatments for diarrhoea to make my self-treatment as effective as possible.
The following morning I was lucky enough to get an appointment with my GP clinic, and I prepared myself by brushing up on the topic to be a more intelligent participant in the consult. (See the post below.)
My homework meant that my responses to my GP’s questions were more informed, and the exchange actually made me feel more confident that the advice I was getting from my GP was spot on.
While I’m conscious of the fact that patients need to heed Pope’s warning about the Pierian spring, I think the ability to move beyond a passive engagement in the consult can be a very good thing.
Where is this likely to take us? In the case of Jonathan Zittrain, quite a long way. Struck down by a mystery fever, the Harvard law professor open-sourced his diagnosis via a March 15 “tweet” (apparently via Tumblr) from a colleague, the remarkable copyright activist Lawrence Lessig, now director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Centre for Ethics.
Earlier another colleague had asked a medical blog to canvass doctors to help. This example of “crowd-sourcing” produced what Zittrain, fortunately still with us, described as “amazingly helpful comments from people and doctors at large, including references to two discrete academic journal articles — one from a Korean medical journal from 1994!”
This story takes the concept of ehealth somewhat farther than I had anticipated. Zittrain explains:
Thanks to the Net I had a copy on my PC and then e-faxed to the nurse’s station on my floor in a matter of minutes. In the meantime, over the course of today (Monday the 15th), additional results have come back to help narrow the diagnosis in a properly documentable and formal way — one that’s converging, it seems, to the obscure Korean article. To be clear, the terrific doctors here have been methodically arriving at this diagnosis already.
What’s particularly encouraging is the attitude of the doctors involved in this incident. According to Zittrain: “I do believe that many eyes make all bugs shallow, and the truly fantastic team of doctors here was OK with a blog being kept. (The case has involved, from what I can tell, multiple specialties from across the hospital and beyond, and every single doctor I’ve encountered, including the hospitalist who manages the case, has been fearsomely smart and intensely engaged.)”
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