The Importance of Pooling Medical Knowledge

Medical attention isn't something most people can afford to mess around with, or should mess around with. You can cut corners on repairs for the house or the car; those can always be seen to later, and you may even be able to effect some repairs yourself. But the human body is much more complex than a car or a house, and requires closer attention. Even though it often takes years for medical practitioners to find themselves conducting a regular practice, mistakes can be made. One famous example happened when, after a surgery, a woman discovered that the surgeon's left the medical scissors inside of her.

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Shocking, isn't it? Uncommon, yes; but much less likely to occur in an operating practice where proper procedures are taken, and the cutting edge shaves the scene. Medical advances are beyond the cutting edge today. There are even treatments which can build organs and limbs for prospective patients. As yet, those services haven't transitioned into regular, mainstream applicability; but that the science exists, and is developing, there is no doubt.

Medical practitioners working in the field need to continuously network for a variety of reasons. There's avoiding such errors as that scene in the X-ray above, and there is also the pooling of resources. There are billions of people on the planet, and millions simultaneously seeking medical assistance the world over. Some are going to have strange conditions which have never been seen before, while others have a common condition with an unfamiliar twist. Regardless of a condition's uniqueness, it must be catalogued and understood to the fullest extent of any medical practitioner's ability. It is the same principal as discovering the cause of a unique mechanical error on a vehicle. Mechanics will pool their resources and ask probing questions of one another through a variety of networks. Some use the internet, some just know where the other mechanics hang out in town, drop over to that particular water-hole and pick their brains.

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Medicine must necessarily transcend the realm of the auto-mechanic, however: the stakes are much higher. Medicine needs to have higher levels of accountability, and practitioners passionate enough to share their knowledge with other medical professionals in the field. There are today a number of excellent services which exist specifically to help medical professionals pool their resources. This actually saves years of research and development, and that's one of the intriguing things about modern technology. Because there are services like MDSandBox, practices as disparate as North Dakota and Hawaii can confer in real time regarding a patient's condition. 

In a modern world where the expenses of living increase even as the standards of living decrease, proper medical attention is required across the population. In fact, the magnitude of that attention increases as time goes by. Even while technological advances are pooling together and providing some of the greatest breakthroughs in human history, on the other end of that coin are synthetic foods and substance abuse epidemics that are breaking mankind at almost the same rate. Pooling resources has never been more important, or more possible, than it is today.

There are thousands-millions-of lives that have been lost because some simple medicinal procedure wasn't adhered to. Before sanitation, birth rates were almost as likely as a coin-toss in Europe. Now the figures have changed substantially. Imagine if that information could have been shared globally when it were discovered? Today, that is entirely possible, and the increasing trend. It makes sense to get involved with some form of resource-pooling in modernity if not for the sake of your practice, for the sake of your patients.