 |
 |
On February 27th the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "E-Mail Medicine" by William M. Bulkeley. The following exerpts (sorry, I don't have a scanner) from this article may add perspective to the Pallidotomy debate and other issues on this board. "....last year, a few ALS patients began taking a new drug called Neurotonin, which is approved for treatment of epilepsy. Soon, doctors were beseeched to prescribe it. Now, an estimated one-third of the 30,000 ALS patients in the U.S. have taken Neurotonin. Use has been so widespread, in fact, that is is complicating medical science's ability to assess other potential ALS treatments." "The basis for Neurotonin's popularity? On-line computer communications." Neurotonin is a recently approved drug indicated for treatment of epilepsy, but a single doctor prescribed it for ALS and the word spread like wildfire over the wires. The result was "...a drug study initiated by electronic bulletin board..." The article goes on to discuss situations in which participants in studies find out that they are on placebos through on-line communciation and then either drop out of studies or contaminate the results. This was less of a problem before individuals with similar medical problems could directly access one another so readily. "The whole structure of medicine has been based on the assumption that physicians have the current information and patients don't. The bottom line is, the consumers will have virtually all the information professionals have, " says Tom Ferguson, a physican and research fellow at Harvard Medical School's Center for Clinical Computing. "This is comparable to the way communism fell. Once people start getting in good communication, you won't be able to play the game in the same way." Welcome to the future. Regards, Ken Aidekman