Promethius wrote this in a post this morning (the post has too much...HTML? in it for me to be able to easily use the quote function):
"I think everyone cares about their credibility Scott. Medical doctors - in contrast to PhD's - appear to be a rare species on these fora. They should be protected and encouraged to share their hard-gained knowledge. Impostors, on the other hand, should be very quickly exposed, don't you think?"
[I've included the last part only for completeness sake. I will not adress it again]
"They should be protected and encouraged to share their hard-gained knowledge". I am very curious what kind of hard gain knowledge you had in mind. I do agree that hard earned medical knowledge AKA clinical experience is a very valuable commodity. But that is exactly what the recent witch hunts around here are against i.e. anectdotal experience. You don't seem to want acquired clinical experience, you want a pub med (medical literature) computer terminal. Acquired clinical experience is very valuable because stuff that works on paper don't always work in the real world, and there is stuff that works for which there is (alas) no good data. Thus:
In theory things are the same in theory and practice.
In practice they are not.
By all means verify who you are talking to, and check out the info, but you can not verify clinical experiene except by asking other docs and hoping they have acquired the same clicincal experience. In the..alternative world....heh lots of luck.
Prometheus, Opales, others comments?
