I Will Never Trust Dr. Wiki
… because I will never trust malicious teenagers.
a nice section of EKGs, but I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever use it for anything remotely related to patient care. I don’t care if it ends up having the top 10 results for my query on Google. I don’t trust wikis.
I know everyone says that if you screw with a Wikipedia page, within the next hour, it will be edited back to the correct information, so that at any time, 99.9% of pages are accurate. However, I will never use a source that is immediately edittable by anyone at any time. I screwed with Ask Dr. Wiki’s Aortic Stenosis page, and it still lists one of my causes: Tricuspid Aortic Valve (it should be Bicuspid Aortic Valve). I don’t care if 99.9% of the time Dr. Wiki is correct. If the time that I’m using it is when it’s inaccurate, that’s a big problem.
It’s one thing to provide basic health information geared toward patients that can provide free, almost-always-accurate education to patients, but it’s another to try to provide it to physicians.
See also: Ganfyd, which requires proof of being a physician in Canada, the UK, New Zealand, or Australia. (But if you really wanted to mess with it, it wouldn’t be that hard.)
I agree that providing online information to patients is a good idea but I disagree with your comment regarding physicians not needing online health information from a medical wiki. We do need to work together to ensure the information is accurate and not tampered with, but this modality is still young and I am sure we will be able to work out the kinks. As you will learn once you progress further into your training, the pockets in your medical lab coat are only so big and what you remembered last month you will not remember next year. The ability to have access to information online will allow you to take better care of your patients and that is why we practice medicine. Also regarding your correction to AskDrWiki, calcified tricuspid aortic valves are one of the most frequent causes of Aortic Stenosis so when you are on your Cardiology rotation you can still AskDrWiki.
I absolutely agree with the idea and concept, Ken, but until we have some way to absolutely verify that the information is correct, and has not been maliciously tampered with, it should not be used.
Also, my edit wasn’t a “correction,” it was a purposely made mistake (the previous version of the page linked to “Bicuspid Aortic Valve.”
Amen, Graham. I wrote something similar about the problems with wikis for medical information here:
http://davidrothman.net/2006/12/28/medical-wikis/
There are also a heck of a lot more wikis for medical information than AskDrWiki and GANFYD. For a partial list, see:
http://davidrothman.net/2007/01/02/lots-more-medical-wikis/
Ken,
I have to disagree with you on what I can fit in my pocket. I’ve got InfoRetriever on my PDA, updated monthly and it includes much more reliable sources (Griffith’s 5-min Clinical Consult, Cochrane) than a wiki. And if I get around to increasing the memory in my PDA, I can add a lot more. You’re using a false comparison. The option isn’t: a) traditional paper books vs. b) free internet. I can get fabulous stuff online by either paying for it (or having my hospital library pay for it) and I know my loopy sister-in-law who is convinced she has [insert random disease here] because she saw it on [insert random TV talk show here] can’t change the pages.
Amanda
FPNotebook.com is a good resource which religiously provides citations.
MDConsult is an excellent resource (although not free), especially for certain specialties.