Docs Unbound on iPhoneNow physicians and nurses can use the iPhone to quickly consult a wealth of continually updated information on diseases, drugs,

Now physicians and nurses can use the iPhone to quickly consult a wealth of continually updated information on diseases, drugs, and tests and to keep up with medical journals. For a limited time, a live demo of Unbound's iPhone interface is available at www.unboundmedicine.com/iphone.

Unbound Medicine offers a wide choice of medical products for the iPhone, placing emphasis on well known, regularly updated references. Among the popular titles available are Harrison's Manual of Medicine and Pocket Guide to Diagnostic Tests from McGraw-Hill, 5-Minute Clinical Consult from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Red Book® from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Davis's Drug Guide and Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary from F.A. Davis. Unbound MEDLINE rounds out the offering, allowing clinicians to track favorite medical journals and quickly search more than 17 million journal articles.

Unbound Medicine's customized iPhone interface takes full advantage of the built-in Safari™ web browser to give health professionals quick answers over cellular and WiFi networks. Users navigate intuitively by tapping on index terms or by entering searches into clinician-friendly forms. Cross-links and lists of related content instantly take a clinician from a disease management discussion to a drug monograph for the correct dose, possible interactions, and adverse effects of a recommended medication.

Source: Medgadget

Wisdom of the crowd: is it right for medical information?

An interesting post from the Clincal Cases and Images - Blog written by Dr. Ves Dimov, M.D. about edit wars on Wikipedia.

Background

Wikipedia uses the "wisdom of crowds" concept which postulates that scores of non experts do a better job writing an article than a single expert. It is probably true. Most experts are busy people and do not have time to write, edit and protect from vandals more than one million articles.

Any social media website (and Wikipedia is one of them) has a relatively small number of devoted users who keep the project going and do the bulk of contributions. For Wikipedia, these users are about 500 and they are called administrators. They are in charge of keeping the encyclopedia what is supposed to be -- an encyclopedia -- and not a self-promotion tool.

What happens when administrators disagree with regular contributors? Edit war. There are revisions and versions changed back and forth until sometimes users are even locked-out of "Wikipedia land."

How is this related to medicine?

According to a recent Medscape editorial, "Wikipedia is the future of medicine, and it's good." There is a Clinical Medicine project on Wikipedia which one day may become the most comprehensive medical textbook. Dean Guistini of UBC Academic Search - Google Scholar Blog also started a wiki at University of British Columbia.

I was reading the Wikipedia article about Polycythemia and since I had an illustrative typical case of secondary polycythemia on ClinicalCases.org, I decided to add it in the "External Links" section at the bottom of the page. That was a well-intentioned and innocent addition, I thought. One of the administrators, JFW, disagreed, called my little effort "advertisement" and deleted the link. We discussed it at the talk page and since I tremendously respect people who take care of the world's largest encyclopedia (for free), I just moved on.

Some people are tougher to deal with though. One hair-transplant surgeon is having fierce fights on his talk page regarding his contributions to Wikipedia which are dubbed by some administrators "commercial" and "promotional." If you have 4-5 minutes, I would recommend reading the whole page to get a feel of what an edit war looks like:

Administrator: Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing. However, unconstructive edits, such as your changes to the Raymond V. Damadian page, are considered vandalism, and if you continue in this manner you may be blocked from editing without further warning. Please stop, and consider improving rather than damaging the hard work of others. Thank you. Talk: Administrator.

Plastic surgeon: Unconstructive edits, vandalism? nonsense. The page on Raymon V Damadian contains numerous factual errors and much evident confusion about the technology which I was just attempting to correct. I'm and MD PhD who was there when all this stuff was going on. Even published papers in the field and know many of the princopals. See my comments at. Talk:Raymond V. Damadian.

There is (was?) also a Wikipedia page about one of the medical bloggers, Summer Sethi, which was labeled for deletion as a "vanity page":

Strong delete: Wikipedia is not a resume or publication list. There are perhaps thousands of other medical researchers with similar publications, nothing shows why this person is any more notable than them. --Ragib 23:59, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

The Full-body scan article is another example of a disagreement between contributors and administrators.

A fine line

Administrators like JFW and Samir are the backbone of the Clinical Medicine project in Wikipedia. Their job is to keep the vandals and self-promotion types out of the encyclopedia. If you make contributing too difficult though, "regular guys" may just go somewhere else.