One of my grandfathers lived from 1900 to 1969 on a farm in
rural Illinois. Many of his generation and his initial descendants went to a general physician, Dr. S.
I was young, and Dr. S was elderly when I met him, but he was locally famous. He seemed at home in “farm country” and he never held
any pretensions of grandeur.
Patients had no clue about the Science of Medicine behind
any of Dr. S’s prescribed medical practices, because no other sources of
information were available to them other than Dr. S himself. There was a
monopoly on medical information. There was no “product transparency.”
You only have true product transparency when you know
everything you need to know and want to know about a product before you buy it.
Take food for example. There is pretty good product transparency for a
hamburger. Everybody knows what a hamburger is and everybody pretty much knows
what a hamburger tastes like. It’s easy for the consumer to compare a hamburger
from one restaurant to a hamburger at another restaurant.
Or take the computer. Nowadays, you can get an extensive
list of all the specifications of a computer before you buy one. Not so with
medical treatments.
This monopoly on the "inside medical information" has continued throughout
my father’s generation. There is no true “product transparency” when it comes
to medical treatments. The exact specifications of medical treatments, the
really important information, the inside medical information that you really
need to know, is still a secret. The advent of the Internet has helped, but it has
not solved the problem.
Patients and healthcare providers need to be empowered with
better medical information. They need near perfect “product transparency.” They
need to know exactly how well medical treatments work without spending months sorting
through the existing 20 million medical studies,[1]
and without visiting doctor after doctor.
For many years now, I’ve been working how to solve the
product transparency problem in medicine, which could also be called the “treatment transparency” problem. Actually, I also like to say that we need “medical practice transparency.” A medical practice can be a treatment, or it can
be any other medical action such as ordering a blood test, or ordering an
x-ray.
[1] Fraser AG, Dunstan FD. “On the
impossibility of being expert.” BMJ. 2010 Dec 14;341:c6815. doi:
10.1136/bmj.c6815.
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