It is not the message. Many people make the mistake of assuming that if it is on the Internet, it is so technically fantastic, it must be true. Indeed, the fact that the information is there, means nothing more than someone figured out how to put it there. The Internet is the one medium where one can easily be the author, the editor and the publisher all at the same time. As we create the ethics of the Medical Internet, we are drawing upon all domains-including medical ethics, business ethics, journalism ethics, the ethics of medical journals and medical education, and especially continuing medical education.
Doctors listen to patients and family members.
They observe and examine patients, identify problems and stratify them, order tests, offer differential diagnoses with loops and institute interventions, monitor the course of whatever is causing concern, and institute primary or secondary intervention. They seek, observe, gather, assimilate, interpret, dispense, and monitor information, and they provide feedback. The practice of medicine is primarily information. Indeed, one cannot talk about the practice of medicine without talking about patients and physicians together-the two groups do not exist apart, only together. The practice of medicine includes education, licensing, credentialing, imaging, nursing, pharmacy, laboratory, education, payment scheduling, and so forth, and regardless of what some believe, the distribution of medical information is not the practice of medicine.