That said, make no mistake: I admire good physicians, and I grant them high respect. But I want to work together with my doctors in a collaborative effort to maintain a continuum of care. Anything less seems impossibly careless.

Internet-enabled medical diagnosis is running that experiment. If we could abolish the medical prescriptions, the experiment could really take off. In the meantime, doctors calm down and look at the evidence.

So, who thinks that second year medical students are qualified to make clinical judgments of any kind, even with all their textbooks laid out in front of them? Patients are, of course, the most qualified and only ones capable of making personal decisions relating to their own health. But, accurate clinical judgments assessing a clinical situation and developing an appropriate treatment regimen? There’s a reason medical students are worth less than mice in a hospital.

Have you ever heard of “student syndrome”? Medical students being exposed to volumes of information, much of it terrifying, often jump to tremendous and devastating conclusions about their own health. It then takes the experience of residency and practice to temper this knowledge and understand what is plausible and what is not. The internet cannot supplant experience, nor do many websites pretend to. However, many intelligent people, including medical students, don’t yet understand this and can draw incorrect conclusions based on black and white facts, without understanding a “clinical picture.” These people should then bring their concerns to their physician, a clinician practiced in the art (and not just the science) of medicine, and together they can work on a plan.

There is a reason that physicians don’t practice by themselves for a number of years after acquiring all the information of medical school. Patients should not practice by themselves after gaining information from the internet either. It’s a team effort.

Yes, who are you, Dr. Vartabedian, to imply that patients are too stupid to discern the good information from the bad? To me, this smacks of arrogance on your part.

I doubt seriously that most folks who go online for health information are doing so because they want to self-medicate. Perhaps Dr. Vartabedian would rather patients blindly accept everything he tells them instead of fully researching issues pertaining to their health. I’d think an informed, educated patient would be welcomed by most docs, but perhaps not in Dr. Vartabedian’s case. And just what if a patient, in the course of online research, was to stumble across a novel therapy for his/her ailment and the Dr. was not aware of it?

Yes, there is good and bad information out there on the web. There also are doctors who don’t always give out good or correct information, either, despite their educations and years of practice. Were it not for the web, we would not have been able to research all of the therapies available to treat my mother’s brain cancer. The local oncologist, claiming to be an expert in this area, was anything but. He put my mother on the standard protocol and wanted her to continue it even when the experts at a major university research center ran tests and said it was no longer working. He claimed to have never heard of using the (recently FDA-approved) drug Avastin for treating her disease.

I think Dr. Vartabedian needs to get off his high horse and rethink his position on patients researching health information on the web. Most who do are just looking for answers and want to be prepared when meeting with their healthcare providers. What is so wrong about that?

The more you know, the more you realize how less you know.