About Family Medicine Net Guide

On behalf of our staff and Editorial Board, I’d like to welcome you to the inaugural issue of Family Medicine Net Guide. Over the course of the last decade, computer and connective technology (ie, the Internet) have changed the health care system for all time. This change is not merely cosmetic; it represents a fundamental shift in the way medicine is and will continue to be practiced moving forward. The days when a single physician was the central—indeed, the only—source of knowledge about health and disease for a given patient are gone forever.

The Internet is allowing patients to become more informed about the decisions that will shape their health care. A recent Pew Foundation study found that 52 million adults in the United States have used the Internet to research health information of some sort; almost half of those who did said that the results of their search affected their decisions about seeking and receiving treatment in a significant way. In general, this is a profoundly positive development: you—and other patients like you—are becoming partners in your own treatment, discovering how to minimize risk and maximize therapeutic efficacy.

Unfortunately, there is a downside. Every day in our Internet travels, we encounter sites purporting to offer valuable medical information that are unreliable, incomplete, or even fraudulent. A largely unregulated online environment allows sites that promote unscientific, misleading, and plain old bad medicine to exist and even thrive. This can, as you might imagine, lead to unpleasant consequences for the patient, if useful remedies are foregone for the sake of Internet-promoted quackery.

Our goal at Family Medicine Net Guide is to review and compile the very best of the medical Internet, to keep you from mistaking the bad medicine for the good. In addition to listing the most complete and reliable online resources and tools related to a variety of conditions, we provide articles and departments that will help you find additional online information on your own. In this way, we hope to maximize the value of the Internet as a tool to improve your health care.

Improving the lives of patients is just one half of the goal of Family Medicine Net Guide; we strive to make the job of the physician easier, as well. When patients educate themselves about the conditions that affect them, they tend to avoid risky behaviors, and suffer from less illness. They tend to adhere more faithfully to the instructions of their doctor. They tend to be more open to a variety of treatment possibilities, and more prepared for the risks inherent in those possibilities. In short, they tend to be better patients. Moreover, when the busy physician can direct patients to the sites contained in these pages—there to research information outside of office hours—it saves precious physician time that can be spent seeinag and evaluating patients.

In today’s health care system, the most powerful tool available to doctors and patients alike is not the stethoscope, not the antibiotic, and not the X-ray; it’s information. Information is the currency that will power and shape modern medicine. It is to the search for that information that Family Medicine Net Guide is dedicated. We’re glad to have you along.

Yours,

Mike Hennessy Publisher