Medline<\/a>. The reason<\/p>\nis that I am supposed to work with some Dutch colleagues on a project<\/p>\n
concerning "the reliability of medical information on the Internet."<\/p>\n
(We are funded by the Netherlands government, which is one reason I took<\/p>\n
the job.) The tension I hope to explore is between medicine as a standardized<\/p>\n
discipline and the Internet as a wide-open medium. Medicine has been standardized<\/p>\n
because there is supposed to be "one best treatment" for a given<\/p>\n
condition (when fully described), based on the best scientific evidence<\/p>\n
available at the time. Although physicians still have great discretion<\/p>\n
and often offer divergent advice, powerful forces work to standardize<\/p>\n
medicine. It is illegal to practice medicine without a license or to use<\/p>\n
or sell regulated drugs without a prescription. To gain a medical license,<\/p>\n
one must pass through an elaborate training and socialization process,<\/p>\n
including graduation from an accredited medical school and apprenticeship<\/p>\n
under experienced physicians. One then bears marks of membership in an<\/p>\n
exclusive body: diplomas on the office wall, a white lab coat, an expectation<\/p>\n
that one is to be addressed as "doctor." The Internet, poses<\/p>\n
a threat—not only to these professional prerogatives—but also<\/p>\n
to the "one best treatment" ideal. Someone who wants to locate<\/p>\n
medical information or advice online can easily find herself looking at<\/p>\n
a mix of official recommendations and highly eccentric ideas promoted<\/p>\n
by laypeople. It is considerably harder to tell the difference between<\/p>\n
official and unofficial advice than it was in the old days, when the main<\/p>\n
sources of information were people in white coats and refereed journals.<\/p>\n
In response, the National Library of Medicine, a $250 million\/year federal<\/p>\n
agency, has created a single Website that lays out the "one best<\/p>\n
treatments." I am going to try to assess the result. To put my basic<\/p>\n
question boldly: should we hope that everyone who goes online for medical<\/p>\n
advice goes to Medline? If yes, what policies can the government adopt<\/p>\n
to channel people there? If no, why not?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A bad day for blogging, because I’m very busy with the technical details of preparing our joint report with the Carnegie Corporation, the Civic Mission of Schools. Choosing paper stock is not interesting to write about. I did quickly email the National Library of Medicine to ask about the budget and mission statement for Medline. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-and-public-issues"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}