Open Access Rant: How Does Your Doctor Learn About the Newest Medical Findings??

Everybody would like to find a doctor who is knowledgable about the latest developments in medicine. Whether these developments relate to new treatments, or new methods of diagnosis, or treatments that are dangerous or do not work, we want our doctors to know this information. How do doctors find out about these things?

Well, there are many sources of this information, but one we hear a lot about these days is a little disconcerting. It turns out that a lot of doctors get the latest information from drug company reps who stop by the office and leave imformation pamphlets or who talk up their companies latest products. This could be OK, except for the fact that many of the drug company reps either purposefully provide misleading information, or in fact do not actually know what is good or bad information.

One reason this is such a big problem is that, like everyone else these days, doctors are really busy and overwhelmed. So they sometimes do not have any time to read the actual medical studies that might be relevant to what the drug company reps are saying. But that is a bit lame of an excuse, since it is their job to know these things. Thus I really think they should read more of the medical literature and not just drug company propaganda.

But herein is one of the biggest problems in modern medicine. Even if you have a really hard working doctor who is willing to read the latest papers, they may not be able to. This is because even though most of the medical studies were paid for by the government in some way, they are not freely available for the doctors to read, because they are published in journals that charge exceptionally high prices for subscriptions. Doctors in large institutions probably have good access to this information. But doctors in small groups may not. Imagine if congress passed laws but lawyers were not allowed to read them without paying a fee to someone. The system for medical literature is really absurd.

I got thinking about this when re-reading Lance Armstrong's autobiography "It's Not about the Bike." In the book, Armstrong describes how when he had testicular cancer he had a friend who was a doctor bring him the latest studies on this type of cancer and he read all of them. Well, this only was possible because his friend must have had access to all the publications through a university or very large medical group. Wouldn't it have been better if Armstrong could have just gotten the studies himself, given that most were paid for by the US Government in the first place? Well, if people doing medical research published their finding in Open Access journals, then anyone could read the articles, from doctors, to patients, to family members, to journalists. We would all benefit if this was done.