The Internet and Medicine

The Internet and Medicine

Can more information replace intuition and your own perception?

The profession of a doctor in the person of a so-called general practitioner included the whole human being about a hundred years ago in the then leading countries or the wealthy states. The division into specialties began only then. The division into therapists who take after the knife (surgeons), and those who avoid it, was one of the first such delineations. Slowly came to such subjects as obstetrics, psychiatry, pediatrics, neurology; and behind them, like a still rather modest multiplied tail of the comet, was the field of secondary research. Around the middle of our century, the number of medical specialties began to increase.

After the then general practitioner, a so-called all-around man, often a friend of the house, looked after all family members from the babies to the great-grandparents, followed by a period that could be called collective specialization. It consisted of arranging a consultation at the hospital bed in cases that clearly required good expertise that the all-rounder might not have. The result was different. Sometimes a surgeon, who wanted to intervene with a sharp intervention in the diseased organism, competed with a preventive internist. The extension of the additional investigations has created the ever more lavishly technologically equipped laboratories.

Nowadays, the doctor is no longer in the joking scheme of military medicine, according to which proverbial laxatives, cold or hot envelopes (mostly from barley) were. Or the diagnosis was according to the most flush saying: dementia praecox up to the age of forty, and then dementia senilis. After the breakthrough of electrocardiography, after the first dichotomy (electrocardiography - encephalography) there was a strong increase in its potential applications. Added to this were microscopic, ie histological and electrophysiological examinations, as well as differential diagnostics, which became such a strong domain that it seemed impossible to put the learned and practiced medical knowledge into the head of a doctor.

As usual with progress, it has a bright and darker side. Hardly any disease unit can do without a selection of additional examinations. On the one hand, it supports the doctor, on the other hand, he begins to concentrate his technical attention on an isolated body system. Therefore, it happens that the treatment of a part of the body obscures or removes from the medical field of vision the organic whole which constitutes the human organism. It is not always good for the patient.

As you know, the Internet is not just a duplicated and expanded means of communication, but to a certain extent an information technology sucker whose countless branches can be found in various databases. In this sense, dissecting the state of the organism is possible for a physician who is willing to trust a statistically interpreted vast amount of routine adjunctive examinations, and perhaps will create competition for the physician. As American research has shown, a diagnosis made by a versatile review of patient data stored on the Internet can already compete with the diagnosis and treatment indication of medical professors.

The Internet can, therefore, if used and used properly, especially support a prospective doctor. It may also be misleading, however, because the quality which medicine prided itself on in the heyday of medical individualities, namely the intuition which revealed its power of recognition in direct contact with the patient, and which represents an almost inalienable knowledge and ability, is Network cannot be transferred. That immediacy of the image of a patient with his personality, his character, with a multitude of difficult-to-describe details of the disease situation that an under-experienced physician can easily escape will become, and possibly will, for a long time for Internet diagnostics and therapy stay out of reach.

When it comes to a good analysis of diagnostic examinations, e.g. As the electrocardiograms go, databases accessible via the Internet can help a specialist poorly oriented in this field. However, it sometimes happens that the findings, which are based only on electrocardiographic data, do not have perfect enlightenment. Today, such aids as tomography, ultrasonography, 24-hour Holter recordings, positron emission tomography, and finally molecular biology are used, applying new types of investigation for physiological and pathological phenomena. Although we are dealing with both the anamnestic and the diagnostic details, which provide additional information, thanks to the latest technologies, we should be aware that there is progress in health care, including the tendency, is to liquidate medicine as an art and to introduce here the detail of the already almost algorithmic analyzes.

The whole picture is to be recognized as part of the process that greatly complements the battle with the disease and increases the lifespan, but at the same time it appears that the diseased person is being dissected into an ever-increasing number of not always and not necessarily compatible circumstances, because where we have a lot of results that only consider statistically detectable factors, these results can collide with each other. For this reason, it is not easy to judge whether the Internet evidence and aids are only blessings or labyrinthine complications for medicine. By the way, the same process has transformed the pharmacists - as masters of the composition of beneficial chemical substances - into sellers of nearly always finished preparations.

A characteristic indicator of acceleration in the general medical field may be the fact that the pharmacological compendia just published a few years ago are at the same time being supplemented by streams of novel drugs marketed by large pharmaceutical companies, while at the same time each year newer editions of these compendiums are being added Drugs disappear because they have dangerous side effects or because they have gone out of fashion, since even the medicine is subject to the changeability of fashion.

Americans recently discovered, with their popular statistic, that two million people treated with medications prescribed by doctors have become seriously ill due to the side effects of these medicines and that as many as 106,000 of the patients treated have died as a result of these side effects! The globalization of communication networks and the duplication of content-changing databases can not counteract such oppressive phenomena because this whole domain is led by statistics. Metaphorically speaking, one could translate Lenin's "who-who" into health care by asking whether the medically expanding Internet only supports or supplants the profession, which traditionally has always been practiced by humans becomes.

The Internet represents a child of technology, in this case, biotechnology growing into a giant. However, the ambivalence of any technology that brings new evil along with new well-being is undisputed. Specialists suggest that we are carriers of genes whose harmful effects can only be revealed at an advanced age; and that is why these genes, which at least partially contain the effects of mutations and are no longer subject to natural selection, because their effect begins only after fertility, in the course of the prolongation of individual life as cause of us yet unknown, therefore untreatable Indispositions and feelings of indisposition are revealed. The Internet, which we currently control and maybe self-programming in the future, will certainly have to deal with new concerns and complaints of human existence.

Summing up and complementing all that has been said so far, I think, based not on certain knowledge but on the subjective assumption that the Internet as a system of communication with the databases, which is above all statistically valuable, is easier to adapt to the needs of diagnosis for the systems that can be accurately described, ie the mechanical devices such as airplanes, cars or computers, as for the area with which medicine has been dealing for centuries, ie with the ailments of the human body.

It seems unlikely to me that this body of knowledge, which the doctor, aided by all additional examinations, could be replaced with mechanical and algorithmic procedures from the network resources. This is especially true of rare and extreme cases because it is the easiest to recognize what is most characteristic in terms of frequency of occurrence. Rarer cases are not recognized remotely. In a word, one can hardly expect diagnostic or therapeutic flawlessness from the Internet.

The limit of development would be a state in which the technological means and services we create will form an almost independent environment, which will be more helpful in the treatment of deviations and diseases than the human mind. So far, there is nothing to suggest that the globalization of the Internet, that is, the interconnectedness of the resources of medical knowledge accumulated, will trump the people working under the Hippocrates' oath because, in the end, emotional and ethical factors play a significant role in medicine. Even the most perfect communication technologies will hardly be able to replace them.