Modern medicine comes online

How putting Wikipedia articles through a medical journal's traditional process can put free, reliable information into as many hands as possible. school before the turn of the millennium, a single glance in a teaching hospital can tell you how things have changed. Resident and student physicians no longer huddle in groups, listening to their seniors: they lean alone over smartphones or computers, searching for diagnoses and doses. With an Internet connection, you don't need to talk to the brightest people in the room to get the information you need. With the right access, you are one of them. Of course, making a sound clinical decision requires more than Wi-Fi. One must accumulate and contextual-ize disparate bits of knowledge and integrate them into a larger impression shaped by clinical experience, the patient's evolving clinical trajectory, current evidence, and the limitations of the immediate health care environment. After a consensus has been gathered from other professionals involved in a person's care about available options, an informed and compassionate discussion makes the process clear and creates the solid ground necessary for a patient's informed decision. If the latter points are the " art " of medicine, then the former are its science, and that science moves quickly. New evidence pours in to the tune of 12 systematic reviews per day, 1 and accumulating the information and then deciding how to incorporate it into one's practice is an almost impossible task. A study published in BMJ showed that if one hoped to take account of all that has been published in the relatively small discipline of echocardiography, it would take 5 years of constant reading—by which point the reader would be a year behind. 2 Thirty-five years ago, Archie Cochrane remarked that the medical profession could use a critical summary of available evidence to aid in decision-making 3 so the echocardiographer could stop reading and do some echocardiography. The Cochrane Collaboration , launched in 1994, 4 has led to a better synthesis, but it's far from convenient or complete. More than half of the articles are out of date, and this situation is getting worse all the time: 5 having busy academics decide on what topics are important, reach a consensus about new studies that merit practice change, and then publish a distillation of their analysis, is a losing battle. In 2012, hundreds of thousands of new citations were added to MEDLINE, and the …