We are currently at a strange and interesting stage in Indian healthcare. We are juxtaposed between an era when the doctor was God and one in which the doctor is a self-serving schemer and someone to be regarded with suspicion, as any other profit-making service provider. Further, as the
internet inexorably spreads its wireless tentacles through our nation, a generation grows up to learn about medicine from sites like Google and Wikipedia, and to seek answers to questions about their health from sites like Medscape and WebMD and even from Whatsapp groups, on which any/everyone who has a login is ultimately an authority. Gone are the days where Medical textbooks and journals were the primary and sole source of medical learning, when trusty tomes like Grays and Robbins and Harrison and the Index Medicus reigned supreme. There is much that is good about the new world order. First, medicine is becoming truly personalized, and fundamental to this is empowerment and education of the patient. Second with the internet becoming the repository of all intelligence and information about everything, it stands to reason that health-related information should also reside in and on it. Third, as physicians become increasingly overworked, it is to everyone’s benefit that patients independently obtain and have some basic information on their health issues so that they may take more enlightened and informed decisions about their care, and can be more conscientious in their followup than otherwise.
The only flip side as I see it is that medicine is not perfect, not all is black and white, and for every point there is a counterpoint, so there is potential for confusion to reign and for misinformation to spread. Mammography is a classic example of this with equally eminent and diametrically opposing schools of thought regarding its benefits and its risks. Other controversies abound such as the role of salt in hypertension, cholesterol in heart disease, and so the list goes on. A logical approach to decision-making in such situations would therefore be some degree of internet research and self learning, tempered with guidance by a physician specialized in the field. This has the benefit of ensuring that the person for whom getting the correct information could mean the difference between life and death does not simply hear what he/she wishes to hear.