The medical paradox #1

The rentrée this year has brought novelty and new exciting challenges. I decided to get back to clinical work and continue my medical specialisation. You can definetely call it a comeback since several years have past since the last time I was working as a M.D.
Pre-clinical research will now be a parallel life, if I manage to have enough time.

The practice of Medicine has changed so much in recent years with the development of medical software to access patient files, prescription schedules, CT and MRI images, but also the way to transfer information between doctors and hospitals. This, however, poses problems. The time it takes to produce this information equals spending less time actually talking to the patient. It's like when you go to declare your tax at Skatteverket and the workers there tell you to read the brochure and follow the instructions instead of helping you. It feels a bit unpersonal. On the other hand, the patient benefits a great deal if this information is made available to all the specialists taking care of him. Suppose you need the opinion of a neuroradiologist to tell you if there is any difference between a brain scan performed 1 year ago and a new brain scan. He doesn't need to walk all the way to meet you and look at the films, he can calmly look at them on the computer at his office. This is definitely time saving for everyone and we now have fast and strong enough computers to hold almost unlimited information.

I can see the future of medical practice being more and more online but time needs to be put also in the patient. Today, it is not infrequent to hear about hospital queues. Patients can wait 3 to 6 hours until they are finally presented with a diagnosis for their illness, even when they are not ill. This waiting is dependent on many factors - the complexity of the symptoms (often requiring imaging and laboratory work that takes time), the number of available doctors, the number of patients at a given moment at the emergency room, how many specialists are required to rule out an alternative diagnosis, etc. It is very frustrating for a doctor when sometimes a patient says he is being asked the same questions that 3 other doctors have already asked in the last 4 hours, and that all his complaints are already written down. In the end, the patient is actually taking away the very little time the doctor has for him after all the software the doctor had to operate in order to get to him. All in all, it's an interesting paradox...