Since I've started my clinical years, I have changed my method of looking for information. Previously back when I studied at university, I used to borrow lots of books for my revision. I will go to the library and borrow some books that is usually on loan for short period of time. That method was sufficient at that time.
My current rotation requires me to modify my way of searching for medical knowledge. I need more up-to-date information and books can sometimes be outdated. This explains my reliance on internet resources. It is good to be a student under two institutions which are the university and the hospital. Both provide subscriptions to few excellent resources. At the moment, I frequently used Access Medicine, UpToDate and Clinicians Health Channel. Besides that, there are also free resources available on the net such as eMedicine and Online Medical Dictionary.
Even doctors rely heavily on these internet resources. I'm not sure how I am going to cope without internet. The medical field is always changing and we need to be updated with any medical breakthrough in term of treatment and management of patient.
I'm not sure about the situation back in Malaysia but I think I might be dependent on the internet in the future. I hope the internet service in Malaysia will be more competitive and cheaper to the people. High internet broadband penetration in any country will bring more benefit in the long term.
My current rotation requires me to modify my way of searching for medical knowledge. I need more up-to-date information and books can sometimes be outdated. This explains my reliance on internet resources. It is good to be a student under two institutions which are the university and the hospital. Both provide subscriptions to few excellent resources. At the moment, I frequently used Access Medicine, UpToDate and Clinicians Health Channel. Besides that, there are also free resources available on the net such as eMedicine and Online Medical Dictionary.
Even doctors rely heavily on these internet resources. I'm not sure how I am going to cope without internet. The medical field is always changing and we need to be updated with any medical breakthrough in term of treatment and management of patient.
I'm not sure about the situation back in Malaysia but I think I might be dependent on the internet in the future. I hope the internet service in Malaysia will be more competitive and cheaper to the people. High internet broadband penetration in any country will bring more benefit in the long term.
5 comments:
i hope malaysia's general practise uses computers in the near future. saves time & space!
i wonder if we'll ever have CLARA or HOMER in our m'sian hospitals
setahu sy doc/surgeon/urologist sini biasa surf http://www.sciencedirect.com (slalu gak tgk dorg asyik download sini) =)
aliya: i don't think they have that kind of system installed. Perhaps Selayang Hospital have it since the hospital is build recently and quite modern.
I guess we need to chase all the pathology and radiology report on our own.
striker: thanks. That is the link to medical journal. There are few large medical database such as Pubmed/Medline, CINAHL etc :). Most of them requires subscription.
Salam Hafiz,
I always use the listed links. They help. If we rely 100% on books, they will not be sufficient for us. Can we say that technologies ease the way yet burden us with a lot materials which turn out that our doctors expect that we know everything? Hehe.
sarah: true. The current technology introduce us to large amount of information which need to be filtered and analysed. Another aspect is that many patients will search for their disease on the internet and sometimes this can bring quite an interesting discussion between doctors and patients :).
I think we only need to know clinically-relevant information and don't need to know everything. If that is the case, medical course will be longer since we need to learn in-depth in each specialty :)
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