Treatment

With all my concern about clinician as a diagnostic tool, you may come to the conclusion that doctors use their expert knowledge and skill to treat patients, and medical profession should not be too worried about competition with advances in technology.

On this, once again, I beg to disagree.

As to how we treat our patients, there are, of course, two aspects to be considered: knowledge and hand-on skill.

For knowledge, I consider an ordinary doctor nowadays loses in a fierce competition - not with the advances in medical technology, but with globalization - that is, the world is flat.

Oh, no. I am not referring to the fact that many of our patients go to the Internet and read up from Wikipedia about the up-to-the-date treatment of their problem and, in a sense, become part of the physician for themselves. Yes, that causes some inconvenience and embarrassment to us every now and then. But, to me, that's less of the evil, and may actually sometimes do good.

I actually mean the easy availability of opinion from international experts - in the form of guidelines and recommendations.