| Dr. Varghese Thomas
"The internet has invaded all walks of life, there is no
looking back. Get into the bandwagon and go along with it. Or
else be doomed." This is the message you are likely to get
if you are sceptical about the use of internet in present day
life. It should be no different for the medical student also.
The present day medical student starts off with a plus point.
Unlike his counterparts a few years ago, he or she enters the
medical college with sufficient basic knowledge on computers
thanks to the training received at school level itself. But how
far this knowledge is going to be utilised in medical study is a
big question. Unfortunately a large number of the existing
faculty are not computer literate. This is especially true at
the senior and middle level. A lot more has to be done to make
the faculty 100% computer literate. Until then an organised
institutional level interest in computer assisted learning and
teaching will be a mirage and will be confined to a few faculty
members without the official support in their departments.
Moreover efforts of faculty and students who use computer and
internet for study or teaching often go unnoticed and will be
considered as individual fancies if there is no official
sanction.
It is interesting to note that in some universities abroad
especially in Australia, knowledge in computer use, internet and
e-mail is part of the curriculum in the first semester of
medical training. There is no doubt that such a curriculum will
boost the use of computer and internet in the field of medical
education also. How does a medical student get benefited by the
use of computer and internet? There are a number of internet
sites for medical students. These sites provide links to a
variety of study materials and also provide chat and bulletin
board facilities. No doubt these facilities help interaction
between medical students in different parts of the world.
More and more text books and medical journals are coming out
with electronic versions. Electronic text books provide cross
references in a ‘hyperlink’ format which is ‘just a click
away.’ The boredom and difficulty of turning pages to look up
an item can be minimised by using the "search
facility" available with most of these electronic books.
Many of the pathophysiological events are displayed in ‘animated
formats’ which can be played any number of times to understand
the basic concepts. Sometimes video pictures are also provided
to improve the understanding of procedures like endoscopy and
surgery. Photomicr-ographs of normal and abnormal histology can
be easily accessed. Photos with "image maps" even
allow the user to magnify the pictures upto a certain extent.
Simulated anatomical dissections, surgery and endoscopic
procedures are added innovations. The updates of electronic
texts also will be available to the registered user. However it
will be prohibitively expensive for each medical student to buy
and use these forms of learning materials. Like in the case of
hardbound text books, the library and the departments should
keep few volumes of text books in CD ROM format. Some of the
latest e- text books also provide the links to the articles
which are available in the internet. This can be directly
acce-ssed by clicking the hyperlink which will fetch the article
if the computer is already connected to the Net.
Medical journals world over are undergoing sea changes ever
since internet came into existence. At present the journals
reach the user any time from a few weeks to three months after
publication depending upon the mode of transport used. As most
of the journals have a web presence, the latest journals can be
accessed by sitting in any remote corner of earth. There was a
huge gap between the developed and the developing world
regarding availability of medical information. This is no longer
true, thanks to the advent of internet. However the e-journals
provide only a few articles free of cost which are generally
confined to abstracts. Very often this much information is all
that we require. The library can activate the e-journal
membership which can be obtained as a complimentary service when
one orders for the hard copy. The username and password can be
permanently ‘fed’ to the computer which can be programmed to
remember it.
Those planning to go abroad for higher studies can easily
find the web sites of these foreign institutions and prepare the
necessary documents accordingly. Some sites even allow
registration of the candidate over internet and also provide
enough learning materials. There are sites which will allow the
candidates to have preliminary tests over the internet. Some
programmes allow the student to study at leisure and take the
exams sitting in front of his computer. The answers will get
locked on completion of the test and can be sent via the
internet to the evaluation centre.
The new avatar of knowledge, the Internet provides countless
opportunities for anyone who wants to keep himself updated in
medical information. However to get the desired information, one
requires some extra skill which can be acquired and refined over
a period of time. This saves a lot of your time, and of course
the soaring telephone bills. Very often we tend to waste our
time by clicking various links and banners not knowing how to
harness the information. The trick is to put the right key word
or string of words in the search box of sites that offers the
"search engine" facility.
The real hazards of internet are information overload and
misinformation. Many sites pose as authentic sites, which
provide medical information. Very often the data provided is
cooked up and imaginary. There is no easy way to find out the
grain from the chaff. If one uses the common search engines like
Yahoo or Google to search for a common illness like migraine one
is likely to get about a lakh of sites. How to find out really
useful information from this will be mind boggling. It is
prudent to use a medical search engine like the Pubmed hosted by
the National Library of Medicine, USA. Only data from authentic
and standard medical journals are indexed by this site. Some
sites carry the label "HON" which means that the site
is reviewed by the team of "Health on the Net
Foundation" which is trying to put some sort of standards
into the medical information sites available on the internet.
The email and chat facility is really useful for a medical
student who is studying at a place far from his near and dear. E
mail is a very inexpensive form of communication compared to
long distance telephone calls. Chatting with friends and
relatives is reassuring when one is bored or depressed. Unless
used judiciously, chatting can develop into some sort of
obsession. The net friendly faculty can post their lecture notes
at their web sites which the students can download at their
leisure and use it whenever necessary. The students can prepare
their projects and classes by accessing data already available
from authentic sites.
Like any modern technology, the internet has also its ugly
faces. More than half of the sites lead to porn sites and
valuable time is likely to be wasted by a teenager who may get
distracted to these sites forgetting the very purpose for which
he has decided to log into the internet. So it is not the
technology which is to be blamed, but what matters is the way in
which it is used.
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Internet and the Medico