Med School students editing Wikipedia articles does something else which no one here has commented upon--it just might help the future doctors learn to talk to Patients in a way that the patients can understand !!

Probably the single best comment here.

Unfortunately, as much as Medical Students can edit, hopefully always as accurately and yet as understandably as they might, there can always be new further additions that may reflect ignorance or even subterfuge from further additions. The Medical Students may not be the final arbiters of what is posted in the wiki listing.

There may be a nearly constant need to revise things in the ever-updated and revised text.

Yeah, though I think that that means that more of us who care about accurate information should learn how to edit Wikipedia pages and start contributing, fixing errors, etc. I haven't ever learned how to edit a page there, but I've been meaning to, as I do make use of it, and I certainly encounter things that I know to be either inaccurate or incomplete.

I think that the assignment Dr. Azzam has given his medical students would be a great assignment in all graduate programs: given how widely used Wikipedia is, wouldn't it be good to encourage more knowledgeable people to get in the habit of contributing?

So I should use this as impetus to spend a little time today learning how to edit a page. :-)

The flip side of the HIV example is that Wiki was corrected by an authority in a timely fashion...at least faster that the numerous other incorrect advice on the internet.

Wikipedia is great for avoiding a $30 dollar copay, terrible if you're a hypochondriac.

A problem with "evidence based medicine" is that often well designed studies are lacking or provide conflicting conclusions. Metanalysis allows authors to statistically manipulate data from multiple studies to reach conclusions, which are contradicted with data the following month. Our understanding is much like Wikipedia in that it changes over time. The ability to Wikipedia to include a broader range of opinion than many published articles make it a useful source to consider.

I spend a lot of time trying to find facts on the internet, and quite frankly it's not easy.
Generally I find there is at least as much "misinformation" on the world wide web, as there is information.
How are we supposed to make informed decisions, when you can justifiably question the accuracy of almost any information you obtain?

In the immortal words of Mark Twain?

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble..............It's what you know for sure, that just ain't so"

At least you don't have unemployed PhDs in History and English rewriting entire topics and citing themselves as the expert.

Excellent. A generation of doctors learning medicine on Wiki. Wiki isn't even allowed as a source when writing the criteria their medical practices depend on. Who's to say some of that wrong information doesn't "stick" for years down the road.

Did you actually read the article?

It's not about med students learning medicine from Wikipedia. It's about them learning how to edit Wikipedia pages and then using what they've learned in medical school to improve the content of Wikipedia pages that address medical issues.

It says:

A study by the IMS Health Institute published in January names Wikipedia as the "single leading source" of health care information for both patients AND health care professionals.

Thanks, but see my response to Tony: http://www.npr.org/2014/02/...

You're welcomed.

It's true that the article doesn't specifically say that physicians use Wikipedia, but what inference are we supposed to draw? For which healthcare professionals is Wikipedia the "'single leading source' of health care information"? RN's? Home healthcare aides? If it doesn't specifically say 'physician', should we retain a belief that NO physician would ever use Wikipedia?

If the study had shown that Wikipedia was the single leading source for healthcare information for healthcare professionals, but that NO physician was included in that group, I suspect the publication of the study would have pointed out such a significant finding.

I know doctors that use Wikipedia. It's an excellent source of information. For mainstream articles, everything is sourced. If a statement is included in an article that's not sourced, it can be checked in other parts of the Internet.

I didn't assert that no doctors use Wikipedia. I only pointed out that there's no evidence from the story or the link substantiating Tony's relatively strong claim about "A generation of doctors learning medicine on Wiki." There's lots of room in between those two extremes.

"I know doctors that use Wikipedia"

To learn medicine, or for other purposes?

"For mainstream articles, everything is sourced."

My experience is that there's tremendous variation with the sourcing and reliability. And the statement in the link that "Rarer diseases, which often have fewer available information sources and are less understood by patients and clinicians, show a higher frequency of visits than many more common diseases" suggests that less "mainstream" pages get more hits. At any rate, I think that the assignment Dr. Azzam has given his med students is a very useful one, both for his students and for the larger public.

Well, since they're already physicians, I wouldn't use the phrase "learn medicine," but they look up stuff in that area of science. Doctors have to do some research. Encyclopedias have always been a good place to start research in an area you don't have much knowledge about. The overview and the citations are helpful at getting going.

The word 'mainstream' might not be the best choice. What I meant is that the articles that are read a lot will produce a lot of debate, revision, and demand for sources on the talk pages and a lot of stuff gets hammered out there.

Oh, I agree that doctors need to research things, but I would have thought that they'd look up info using a research database like PubMed or a more reliable source, like a medical text. I don't know.

Thanks for clarifying what you meant by "mainstream." I wasn't familiar with "talk pages," but just took a look; that's an interesting mechanism for working things out, though I have no experience with how well it works. Have you edited Wikipedia pages and participated on the talk pages?

I don't think PubMed is the best place to find an overview, so it would depend on how much exposure the individual had already had to the matter in question. There are a lot of things that doctors don't know.

There's also a huge, searchable database of medical journals that requires membership, but again, if you're starting from scratch on a particular matter, that's not the place to start.

I made one change in an article a few years ago, simply because those "citation needed" notations annoy me. It was a two sentence paragraph with a citation, and someone had put "citation needed" behind the other sentence, but if you looked at the source, the two sentences were a verbatim quote, so I changed the way the citation was noted and removed the "citation needed" note. I never went back to see if it stuck.

I've never entered into discussion on a talk page. I have a broad educational background, I know a lot of stuff, and I know more than most people about most subjects, but encyclopedias are not the right place for generalists. That's the world of specialists, who know a lot more than me about their area of expertise.

I've read several of the talk pages, and it seems to be an effective method of hammering out problems with the articles.

Wikipedia is one of the few organizations I make a donation to.

I did. Did you?
Even the link given for a synopsis of the study says clinicians are using Wiki.

"Did you?"

Yes.

"Even the link given for a synopsis of the study says clinicians are using Wiki."

Actually, that page says something a bit different: "Wikipedia is the single leading source of medical information for patients and healthcare professionals." But "doctors" (what you initially wrote) and "healthcare professionals" (their term) aren't interchangeable, as many healthcare professionals aren't doctors. We simply don't actually know from that statement what doctors' use looks like. The synopsis does go on to say "Rarer diseases, which often have fewer available information sources and are less understood by patients and clinicians, show a higher frequency of visits than many more common diseases," but that's mostly a statement about page visits, and it doesn't give any indication that they've assessed who is visiting those pages (e.g., patients, family members, doctors, other healthcare professionals, random members of the public). It's not surprising that "rarer diseases ... often have fewer available information sources and are less understood by patients and clinicians," but that's not a statement about doctors learning from Wikipedia either.

I tried to read the study itself, but one has to register with the IMS Institute to access the study, and I don't care to give them my personal info. Absent more information that breaks out doctors' use of Wikipedia from use by other people, including other healthcare professionals, we simply don't have a reason to think that what you wrote ("A generation of doctors learning medicine on Wiki") is accurate.

The story does say: "My generation absolutely pooh-poohed Wikipedia, and now I'm finding that all my med students, they use that first because it's written in a way that they understand as they are learning to become doctors." But even that doesn't imply that Wikipedia is really where those med students are "learning medicine"; it can only be "first" if they're going on to read other sources, and we can't say which sources they're actually learning from. For all we know, they're using Wikipedia in the same way that I often use it: not as a significant source of learning itself, but to get a brief overview that I recognize may be unreliable, and to see whether the page identifies more reliable primary sources to read, or if it includes terminology that will help me to carry out an effective Google search for primary sources myself.

A clinician is "a person (such as a doctor or nurse) who works directly with patients rather than in a laboratory or as a researcher." It also includes others in the higher echelons of the medical field, which doesn't make me feel any better about the gist of this article. Perhaps I should not have singled out doctors and said instead, "medical professionals?"

My reference to Wiki and medical criteria might have hinted I'm familiar with its use in the medical field. Like yourself, I know it can be used as a starting point with reservation, and I have no problem accepting a well-trained medical professional making use of any web source as a first step in research.

But a concern would be that beginner students of medicine in all capacities, not just specifically MDs, don't have the time or skills to do further "book research." If you'll pardon another broad generalization, it doesn't fill me with confidence that "med students," many of whom have never been taught to do proper college-level library research on any topic, let alone medical, are going beyond that initial look up during the first stages of learning to become doctors, hence my "what might stick" comment. It's great they are rewriting articles. That is the part that will hopefully teach them how to do further research.

The report is available for free through iTunes and seems to be more about social media than the thrust of this NPR article. My phone was being ornery about downloading it though so I lost interest.

But thanks for the discussion.

I think there's a big difference between beginning research on Wikipedia and using it as the single source for making decisions. You can get quite the overview of a topic from Wikipedia which will point the way for further research, and I feel it reasonable to assume that health care professionals know this as well..

Years ago I spoke at a quality conference for physicians. I distinctly recall the room of about 100 doctors split in half on the question of whether patients using the internet to look up their symptoms was desirable. About half said "I can't stand it when they come in with their pile of papers, highlighted and annotated, to explain to me why they think they have this, that or the other." The other half in different degrees of receptivity said "I don't mind it. I can scan through and throw out the quack stuff pretty quickly, maybe learn a thing or two about something I was unaware was out there, or take it to study further to see if there is anything to it beyond my analysis of the patient." One group seemed in the "I'm the doctor, let me do my job" category and the other more on the partner / collaborator side of working with a patient. Might be a good question to ask before choosing a physician. "Would you rather I be passive or prepared?" At the end of the day healthcare is requiring patients to be accountable for their health and providers to be accountable for providing care. A higher level of accountability on the part of both is a win/win.

"...wisened professors..." maybe should be "...wizened professors..."?

Okay, well if Wikipedia articles aren't accurate then this is the solution.