Can I know everything a doctor does by reading the free literature available online?

Answer 1

No online diagnostic site can possibly detect all of the things which a trained physician can discover. For example, the online source can't send blood samples to a lab, can't take an X-Ray and can't "listen" to vital signs which a doctor is trained to recognize.

Phyisicians spend several years in medical school, then more years as interns, even more than that if they are specialists. So it's pretty difficult to gather all of that knowledge into a website center.

It's a good idea, just so you have some knowledge, to review what's avaiable on websites but dangerous to try and treat yourself based on that kind of limited information.

You might save some money but lose your life.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

No. Medicine is both science (learn from reading) and art (learn from experience). Additionally, one requires the appropriate training to be able to distinguish which medical literature is in fact valid, and if so, which subset of patients the study is relevant to. It would be impossible to figure this out on one's own.

Would you step onto a plane who's piloted by a person who learned how to fly 'reading the internet'? Of course not, you would know that approach is lacking.

That said, there are unfortunately doctors who stop reading after completing residency, and use pharmaceutical drug reps as their main source of 'new' information, and practice medicine completely focused on experience. This approach completely ignores the fact that medicine, despite being an art, must still be based on science, which is advancing all the time (albeit at different rates for different specialities).

Answer 4

You could probably gather a lot of the information that we learn in the first two years of medical school - you can learn anatomy, physiology, genetics, biochemistry, pathology, histology, epidemiology, pharmacology and microbiology, but you'll still miss the cadaver dissection and the thrill of preparing your own Gram stained microbiology slides.

Those classes are merely a foundation for the clinical years, where you learn physical diagnosis, history taking and the myriad of other clinical skills. Those are things you won't be able to learn over the internet. No matter how sophisticated digital interaction becomes, you still won't be able to feel ovaries on a bimanual exam, or detect inspiratory wheezing in a post-operative patient.

And that's just medical school. All medical school does is prepare us to train in a particular specialty, which is 3-7+ years of on-the-job training. Much of our knowledge comes from experience.

Answer 5

The trained physician has a lot of practical learning you won't get over the Internet (yet). Dissections, time-critical diagnoses of people in face-to-face situations, the people skills necessary to draw out symptoms from taciturn patients, noting changes in skin coloration, and (most of all), learning to interleave all of this with the rest of your life.

On the Internet, you can collect all of the pulminary ailments for three weeks and study them; in real life, you get them one or two a month, but you have to stay sharp to those symptoms. You have to differentiate simple fever and rash from viral meningitis. You have to ... well, I expect that you get the picture.

Try watching one of hte more technically accurate medical shows. ER and Grey's Anatomy have some excellent medical consultants behind them; you can get some feeling for the difference between medical training and book learning.

Answer 6

Most patients think doctors charge too much. Online medical literature helps you to consult a lawyer to file a malpractice suite.

Answer 7

No, it's not possible to become a Dr. by just reading literature off the Internet!!!

Answer 8

Not unless your free literature comes with dead human bodies to dissect, hands-on experience in hospitals and physicians' offices, and ten years of hard work in medical school.

Answer 9

No. The doctor goes to medical school. Professional medical school. The doctor has had training. Professional medical training. The internet will not teach you the same thing that real people teach you.

-citygirl

Answer 10

You can't replace experience with reading.