Something I encountered was the number of practicing primary care docs who were not up-to-date on COVID-19. Case in point, my own PCP. Early on he listened patiently when I rattled on the topic. Within 2 months, I was getting email requests for information on pandemic topics from him, and I know now that he shared a fair bit of what I se…
Something I encountered was the number of practicing primary care docs who were not up-to-date on COVID-19. Case in point, my own PCP. Early on he listened patiently when I rattled on the topic. Within 2 months, I was getting email requests for information on pandemic topics from him, and I know now that he shared a fair bit of what I sent with colleagues and internal medicine residents in his program. Educating the docs is a team sport. It's unlikely a busy provider will have/take the time to gather the latest Public Health info and be able to immediately integrate them into practice. They need to cultivate their info sources (and he found the university's info sources tainted by state politics; 'nother story) for factual information they can use.
Of note, sending him info didn't require the translation I should have employed for the public. I could use jargon and if he didn't get it, he'd call or email a question.
They do, but the time necessary to read the volume of data available is the problem. I've not looked in a couple months, but last time I did look, I'd archived over 3000 articles and read over 10k. But that's a trivial amount of the over 350k articles out on the subject.
It's the role of public health professionals to make the information available to as wide an audience as possible. The messaging is usually different for different groups. I can do pretty well, one-on-one with patient and family for a medical or surgical case. I can do fine explaining that same case to a friend/colleague "in the business". I have to modify the message for, say, a friend of the family (assumes I have permission to speak to them from the patient and/or family as appropriate) who might be an engineer... or a kindergarten teacher. Same thing with Public Health information. You really need to prepare the message for the audience you're addressing, and in a lot of ways, public health failed that test. We tried, too often, to simply state the facts and expect everyone to have our level of expertise in what we were describing. The words sounded a lot like English, but they didn't necessarily mean what you thought they meant because Those Words we were using might have a general and broad meaning in casual conversation and a more explicit and even nuanced meaning when we employed them in our work. Simply put, all too often, we talked in shorthand and others attempted to interpret what we said, but didn't really understand.
Something I encountered was the number of practicing primary care docs who were not up-to-date on COVID-19. Case in point, my own PCP. Early on he listened patiently when I rattled on the topic. Within 2 months, I was getting email requests for information on pandemic topics from him, and I know now that he shared a fair bit of what I sent with colleagues and internal medicine residents in his program. Educating the docs is a team sport. It's unlikely a busy provider will have/take the time to gather the latest Public Health info and be able to immediately integrate them into practice. They need to cultivate their info sources (and he found the university's info sources tainted by state politics; 'nother story) for factual information they can use.
Of note, sending him info didn't require the translation I should have employed for the public. I could use jargon and if he didn't get it, he'd call or email a question.
A lot of state libraries offer access to databases and electronic resources/journals to physicians licensed by their state
They do, but the time necessary to read the volume of data available is the problem. I've not looked in a couple months, but last time I did look, I'd archived over 3000 articles and read over 10k. But that's a trivial amount of the over 350k articles out on the subject.
They're lucky to have you as a patient. I think my takeaway is to have a doctor whose patients are doctors
It's the role of public health professionals to make the information available to as wide an audience as possible. The messaging is usually different for different groups. I can do pretty well, one-on-one with patient and family for a medical or surgical case. I can do fine explaining that same case to a friend/colleague "in the business". I have to modify the message for, say, a friend of the family (assumes I have permission to speak to them from the patient and/or family as appropriate) who might be an engineer... or a kindergarten teacher. Same thing with Public Health information. You really need to prepare the message for the audience you're addressing, and in a lot of ways, public health failed that test. We tried, too often, to simply state the facts and expect everyone to have our level of expertise in what we were describing. The words sounded a lot like English, but they didn't necessarily mean what you thought they meant because Those Words we were using might have a general and broad meaning in casual conversation and a more explicit and even nuanced meaning when we employed them in our work. Simply put, all too often, we talked in shorthand and others attempted to interpret what we said, but didn't really understand.