On: David Carr's NYT Article, Call The Doctor

Filed in archive Miscellany , Opinion on June 13, 2007

Admittedly, I am a bit giddy that the one sentence comment I made on the diabetes drug Avandia® issue got noticed by David Carr and made it to his New York Times article Call the Doctor.

The said article is David Carr's response and scrutiny of the issue on the diabetes drug Avandia®'s getting implicated to heart attack and cardiovascular death. (In case you are unaware of the issue, you may click here and here for the background).

However, what struck me most in the article are these paragraphs (highlights my doing):

[Dr. Peter Rost, an industry whistle-blower and the author of the Question Authority blog (peterrost.blogspot.com/), said there was extreme value in consumers using the Web as a health resource, even if it is noisy and all over the road.

"Yes, you have to sort it out and you have to evaluate, but all of the information used to belong to the moneyed and the powerful," he said. "Those barriers don't exist on the Web, so people have access to all sorts of information about Avandia."

Perhaps that's true, after some time spent researching the whole issue, I decided to just back away from the mouse. Data is not knowledge, and information is not insight; consumers still have to make their own judgments about the agendas that are at work.

When it comes to meta-analysis on breaking issues, the Web seems better-suited to Paris Hilton than patient safety.]

And it struck me as a huge challenge for science/health/medical bloggers, me being one.

Read the rest of the article here.