bloggers vs Dan Rather

The lawyer who saw the font problems with the Dan Rather pushed memo is interviewed here.

ah but the movie pretends otherwise. Fiction.

The point here is that the internet caught the minor problem with the fonts (a technical point) which quickly was discussed and other people with expertise pointed out more technical problems with the so called memo.

One interesting thing here is that a group of people with different areas of arcane expertise could discuss and detect problems with the memo.

Back then I posted on my blog that a similar dicussion on line was needed for medical papers.

Often we doctors had something called "journal rounds" where we discussed journal articles, often picking out problems in the studies and noting other articles that agreed or disagreed with what was printed.

Yet to get these things pointed out, it meant writing a letter to the editor and waiting six weeks to see IF it would be published.

Yes, nowadays on line letters to the editor are faster, but unlike blogs you don't discuss the article because you don't go back and get a ping that someone answered you or agreed with you.

and to make things worse, often these journals are behind a firewall: no subscription, no reading the details. So you only have a news report and/or maybe access to a summary on the journal webpage.

So why isn't the internet being utilized for peer review of medical articles? Because we dumb GP's don't know anything...just like why should a dumb lawyer know more about fonts than Dan Rather?

Maybe if we docs could discuss things on line this way, more problems would be found faster, and more side effects of drugs be noted.