Epocrates on your palm, anyone? That’s free software too.

You’re welcome to self diagnose all you want so don’t bother walking into an emergency room next time you feel that twinge of chest pain.

While I’m at it, I’d suggest the Kidney Stones up there should go check out the relevant wiki page [nice summary of presentation, clinical findings, investigations and treatments] and maybe recommend that all those mean awful doctors *start* using the site.

It’s not like you all have to worry about doctors relying solely on Wikipedia – if they did that they are too stupid to be a doctor anyway. We only use it for quick information or to check something. I get the majority of my information from textbooks and scientific journals.

Ya gotta love the insistence that med students can’t manage to handle more than one source of information – at the minute firefox sits looking at me with probably a dozen Wiki tabs, a slew of my online textbooks and a host of primary and review journals all at once. Then there’s the stack of paper resources beside the laptop, the notes on the shelf over my head and the assorted pile of gumph on the floor. That’s just to prepare for tomorrow, and it’s a slow day.

further, if any med student solely used wikipedia to learn, they’d fail. we use our notes to get the bulk information, and then wikipedia to fill in the small gaps and clarify things. as a quick reference, it’s great. but wikipedia doesn’t go into enough depth that we would need to pass. all med students know that. me personally, if i don’t understand my notes on a topic, i refer to wiki, then i go BACK to my notes to cover it again, and i almost always understand it by then.

lastly, this is just a joke. you know, an exaggeration? everybody makes exaggerations to make a point or to make a joke even funnier. wikipedia isn’t an end answer at all, everyone knows that. it’s a stepping stone to make it easier to get to the end answer. if anyone actually thought otherwise, really, you need to take things less seriously.

And for the record, books and things that are published by “reputable” people aren’t any more reliable. I’ve found countless books chock full of bullsh*t at the university library, full of horrendously wrong information. How many people do you think check texts for errors before they’re published?

Don’t worry all you angry patients and clients out there–we have books too. They are just not quick in a pinch.

“Gee, she has no infection, her blood is normal, she has no STD’s, but there’s blood and calcium oxalate in her urine.. I wonder what ELSE it could be?”

Here I am, screaming KIDNEY STONES! KIDNEY STONES! “No no no, it can’t be that.” I’m not even a medical student, and I knew what to do next. I had to demand the cat scan that proved there were kidney stones.

These days, you have to be your own doctor because most of the doctors these days GOT their education through wikipedia. It’s great for quick answers, but NOT a study guide for a life-long profession which others depend their lives on.

If they didn’t get a horrible education, they have such a horrible emotional detachment from their patients. I understand some sort of detachment is necessary to maintain sanity, but showing complete apathy is enraging. My grandpa almost died from heart failure because one doctor wanted to hurry off early because he didn’t want to miss his daughter’s basketball game. It didn’t matter this 75 year old man was crying from the chest pain because of his 99% clogged artery. If you aren’t ready for the profession’s sacrifices, then get a new job.

I’ll be fair and say not all doctors are like this, I finally found a good one out of the many I went to. But for those of you saying wikipedia is a great way to get through medical school, please do not ever practice in the Dallas area.

I hope God somehow smites you and interferes with your graduation, as in FOREVER PREVENTING IT FROM HAPPENING.

As others have already pointed out, most errors in medically relevant pages are either a) blatant and immediately ignored by the smarter-than-average people who actually need the information or b) not errors at all – more digging shows that the error is with the textbook [which, if you're lucky, might be updayed before you graduate - unlike Wikipedia, which will most likely be fixed by the end of the week].

Wikipedia’s integration and breadth [there is no 'proper' academic resource available with anything close to the same scope in terms of everything from the basic biochemistry, through physiology, all the way out to epidemiology - if there was, we'd buy it] makes it invaluable. Wiki let’s medical students access more material, more efficiently, than any other resource.

But hey, if you want your medics to be *minimum* a year out of date [textbooks lag at least a year behind journals, which lag several months behind electronic resources] then you look for the ones with no internet.

If a group of people in a region suddenly start typing in “sniffles” and “cough”, they can track a cold’s progress, for example.

Quite facinating, really.

Oh well, I guess there’s worse things…
Such as the fact that the dutch version of Wikipedia really SUCKS, so I hope our Med students don’t try to do the same thing…

I really don’t want want to die because of some annoying kid who thought it’d funny to edit Wikipedia and change “mild sedative” to “DEATH”.