TARRANT COUNTY PHYSICIAN (13)
March/April 2021
but in the form of the Internet and social
media. Everyone is bombarded with
health content, and the mishandling or
misinterpretation of this information has
many potential problems. These can range
from wasted patient resources to creating
false expectations—they can even lead
to physical harm. As doctors we become
familiar with information overload and have
the opportunity to develop strategies to
handle it. We learn to be skeptical, research
thoroughly, test our assumptions, and
rely on experts. It is sometimes easy to
assume the whole world has some of these
strategies too, but this is obviously not the
case. I don’t even need to give a specific
example, just browse Twitter or Facebook
for a few minutes and I am certain one will
present itself. Ideally, everyone would have
instant access to a healthcare worker to
help them navigate the things they see
online. This is currently impossible, so
many patients will have to sort through
the overload of truth and misinformation
on their own. In light of this problem, I am
reminded of a famous quote by a pillar of
our profession:
“One of the first duties of the
physician is to educate the masses”1
-Sir William Osler.
I believe that we can benefit society by
educating our patients about strategies
to sort through medical information they
find online. Strategies like having some
skepticism toward this information,
researching it through reputable sources,
and trying to disprove something they
by Chandler O’Leary OMS-II
see on social media before they believe it.
Strategies that we have had the opportunity
to develop through our medical education.
I am like most second-year medical
students and I am probably too eager to
share what I have learned with those around
me. What has been surprising to me is that
most of the health questions my friends
and family ask or the incorrect assertions I
hear are different from what I expected. For
every time I get to explain how someone’s
medication works, there are five times of
disputing something someone saw on social
media. I understand that not everyone has
the benefit of medical school, but I fear
that the massive amount of online health
information has the potential to cause harm
if people do not have basic strategies to
handle it.
In closing, I will admit that the quote I
used was not complete. The full quote says
that “One of the first duties of the physician
is to educate the masses not to take
medicines.” I completely misrepresented
the quote because it demonstrates how
the simplest strategies can be used to
check the validity of something you read.
One Google search is all it takes to gather
evidence that I was not being completely
truthful with Dr. Osler’s claim. That being
said, if Osler were alive today, I believe he
would agree with the sentiment that “One of
the first duties of the physician is to educate
the masses not to believe everything they
see online.”
1Osler, William, Robert Bennett Bean, and William B.
Bean, Sir William Osler Aphorisms: from His Bedside Teachings
and Writings, (New York: Schuman. 1950).
MMedical school has one primary goal:
passing on humanity’s medical knowledge
to a new generation. There are a few
challenges to accomplishing this goal.
First is a static problem, i.e., the sheer
magnitude of information. Second is a
dynamic problem, i.e., the rate of change
of this information. Humankind’s medical
knowledge is growing and being refined
at an incredible rate. These forces are
constantly at play in medical school, and
they only become more obvious the deeper
one’s understanding of a topic becomes.
Learning more means absorbing all of the
idiosyncrasies and all of the exceptions as
well as confronting the burden of complexity.
This is a problem that our species has been
dealing with forever. Just take the ancient
story of Adam and Eve; life was simple until
they ate the apple and had to deal with the
consequences of knowledge.
“Drinking from a fire hydrant” is the
analogy often used to describe the intensity
of learning in medical school. This is what
medical students volunteer for beginning in
year one, and it will continue until we retire.
The best and only solution is old-fashioned
hard work and careful thinking. This is
the reality that you have to accept if you
choose to be a doctor. Unfortunately, this
same reality of drinking from a fire hydrant
now applies to our whole society that is
woefully unprepared for the flood of medical
knowledge and information.
Our society’s fire hydrant does not
come in the form of a pathology textbook,
Drinking
from the Fire
Hydrant