Information for Patients: a solution?
One of the biggest problems that patients face is a lack of information. This problem may have been mitigated to some extent in the developed societies with the ubiquity of the internet, though the huge amount of anecdotal and even misleading information may be confusing rather than useful. In India this has always been a problem and remains so today. Anybody who has been in medical practice in India will acknowledge that patients are information deprived, about their disease, their prognosis, and the best places for treatment and about the costs involved. This has led to a lot of information published by newspapers which almost all have a health page nowadays. However these are almost always sponsored by hospital chains and peddle half-truths and sometimes plain lies in order to direct patient traffic to their facilities. The newspapers of course are totally regulated by their advertisement departments, and even the interviews that appear in them, extolling the feats of Dr X or Dr Y...