I’m all for social media and networks so it wasn’t a huge shock to discover that a lot of doctors, particularly junior ones, are consulting online resources in order to help them diagnose patients and to improve their medical knowledge.

Naturally that doesn’t mean they’re not qualified to do the job, though I really hope they’re choosing the right online media and resource web sites before dishing out advice and medication to patients. After all, we already know the Internet is a hypochondriac’s dream.

The big report goes into a lot of detail but thankfully Dr Shock breaks it down into more manageable stats.

Like:

• One in ten use at least one Web 2.0 tool.
• One in five use wikis but hardly anyone contributes to them.
• Popular sites are Wikipedia, PubMed, BMJ.
• Reason for using the Internet was mainly its ease of use, but it also wins over text books because it’s more up-to-date, covers more topics and is interactive.
• Google is often used to find specific parts of web sites the doctors already trust, rather than being used to jump into whatever sites pop up first.

Just hope they don’t Facebook your next of kin or tweet your medical details all over the web.

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5. Internet connects NY doc and deaf patient in Uganda