The Age of Information descending upon us, it's a little scary for the medical guilds who previously had full access to years of medical information. With Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo easily directing patients with medical questions to reasonable sources and WebMD and Dr. Koop selling services to curious consumers (through advertising), the guild has lost its monopoly on information.
This explains the abject failure of any attempt to minimize the agreeably noxious practice of direct-to-consumer advertising. Not only does this proposal marked First Amendment implications, but it also...won't work. One can't stop the avalanche of information available to medical consumers anymore.
Moreover, this is also true of websites like this wikipedia-for-health-care-workers, AskDrWiki. It's probably a more beneficial for practitioners and public health stewards to work with and improve these Web2.0 tools. Not doing so risks turning over information portals to more nefarious actors.
That being said...it's still a little scary to have a wiki for health information. Anyone posting anything...anyone editing, correcting, posting - even medical students!
(At least the advisory board appears to have fairly competent specialty editors. And they do have some pretty cool stuff on AskDrWiki, including this whole host of EKGs.)
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