September 23, 2006 --
In an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times ("The Sting of Ignorance",
September 16, 2006) Harvard Medical School professor Jerry Avorn
tells the
story
of
his misadventures
after receiving the wrong treatment for a toxic jellyfish
sting during a vacation on Martha's Vineyard (mistreatment worsened
his condition and created lots of unnecessary pain). His point
-- to illustrate the fact that:
"Even when good clinical trial
data on a regimen or medicine exist, no coherent system ensures
that the message gets out to doctors and patients. As a result,
many treatment choices are driven by habit, old information or glitzy
promotional
campaigns."
Avorn is part of a research group
working on: "defining which medications work
best for which conditions, and how to close the gap between that knowledge
and the care patients typically receive."
Writes Avorn:
"My research
group constantly comes across effective treatments that are
underused, and poor-choice drugs that are widely prescribed...much
of
the knowledge we do have is not communicated to the people who need it....
All of us need access to current, noncommercial medical information.
Besides
helping to contain our runaway medication expenditures, programs
of this kind could prevent
a lot of needless suffering -- by patients and doctors alike."
Couldn't agree more with Professor
Avorn. This is the goal of Angioplasty.Org -- to codify
current knowledge about treatments and get that info out to the public.
Avorn also notes that, when he returned
from the beach, he easily found studies on the
net demonstrating how jellyfish stings are supposed to be treated:
"I
didn’t
discover this through any proprietary medical search engines. I used
Google and Wikipedia, and it took about two minutes."
We agree that the Internet, and
basic search, are a great means of disseminating medical information.
Despite millions being invested in companies creating "medical
search portals," patients find Angioplasty.Org quickly and easily through
Google, our number one referrer.
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