Learning from Sermo

Richard Reece’s observations on the physicians-only website. Here’s a somewhat disturbing comment:

A Sermo loyalist recently said Google, Sermo, and Wikipedia were three websites he consulted most.

Somewhat scary that Wikipedia was used so often for medical consults.

Comments

shadowfax
I use wikipedia all the time for medical reference. I also edit wikipedia, so I am familiar with its strengths and limitations. It’s a fine source, so long as you take it with a grain of salt. The amateur-level articles are easy to spot and disregard. Malicious vandalism is very rare, even more so in the technical medical articles, and usually corrected rapidly by the “watchers.” Existing data suggests that wikipedia, in toto, has an error rate comparable to that of Encyclopedia Brittanica.
My mode is this: if I am just double-checking to confirm something already know, I’ll take a positive correlation with wiki to be sufficient. If it’s a new topic for me, I’ll read the wikipedia article and cross-check with an external source. (usually helpfully linked in the footnotes)
Honestly, with Google, PubMed, and Wiki, I don’t need any other reference texts or sites…
Anonymous
If you look at the actual quote on the homepage of http://www.sermo.com it acutally says “valuable sites I frequent on the internet”
It says nothing about consults. Misquote’s of this type are dangerous.
DermDoc
I think emedicine has good info, especially for those “I’ll-be-right-back”-quickly-google-it moments in clinic.

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