Intended for healthcare professionals

Rapid response to:

The Impact Of Informatics

Shopping around the internet today and tomorrow: towards the millennium of cybermedicine

BMJ 1999; 319 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.319.7220.1294 (Published 13 November 1999) Cite this as: BMJ 1999;319:1294

Rapid Response:

Cyber medicine or cipher medicine?

Cyber medicine helps a doctor to do away with the intense
interrogation by patients before and after treatment. Some sensible
physician may simplify the medical treatment by informing the patients of
its trade secret. The following could be it. We doctors unfailingly assume
that the diseases are due to infection for which antibiotics are
necessary. The antibiotics do not have either target specificity or
microorganism specificity. Since the practice among the physicians now is
using broad-spectrum antibiotics, self-treatment or physician assisted
treatment it does not matter!

Next, painkillers and fever medicines could be taken whenever
necessary for which physician's consultation is a waste of time and money.

Next, when there is inflammation, swelling and pain any anti-
inflammatory drug is of benefit since these drugs are not prescribed based
on individual's specificity.

Next if there is allergy the patients may be informed of a few
symptoms and a few anti histamine drugs that every patient knows by this
time.

And finally, a vitamin supplement.

Thus cyber medicine may cater to suffering individual's evidence
based medicine in the early stages of the disease or any ordinary day-to-
day problems.

Competing interests: No competing interests

15 November 1999
Fazlur Rahman
physician
chennai