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<\/a>Headline from The Atlantic’s article last October<\/p><\/div>\n
Peter Frishauf, member of the editorial board of our journal<\/a>, has brought what is to me the most exciting news for participatory medicine since the OpenNotes project<\/a>. Importantly, this news may have broader<\/em> implications – because it addresses one of the core challenges of patient engagement: the quality and freshness of medical articles.<\/p>\n Last fall [2013], UCSF School of Medicine professor\u00a0Amin Azzam started a course for fourth year medical students to become Wikipedia editors and apply their skills to Wikipedia articles that were important to them and were poor quality. It got big-name media attention (NY Times<\/a>, The Atlantic<\/a>), and it should – because as we’ve often written, one of the core challenges e-patients face (and doctors face!) is finding up to date, reliable information.<\/p>\n This is not a trivial question – you can’t just rely on the peer review process, because it too has flaws, and good luck ever getting mistakes fixed. The biggest example is the ongoing vaccine controversy caused by a massive failure of peer review in the top-tier journal\u00a0Lancet<\/em>, but there are many others. Another shortfall is what our movement’s founder “<\/i>Doc Tom” Ferguson called “the lethal lag time” – the\u00a0years\u00a0<\/em>of delay between a result being discovered and the time it reaches doctors.<\/p>\n Frishauf, who has often written about such shortcomings (see comment below<\/a>), created this 14 minute interview. I have more I’ll say later, but what do you think? (If you can’t see the video, click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n