What may be the first has appeared on Dana Carpender's blog
Get Undoctored!

The first half of what she writes focuses on the spread of information, and how it empowered her own experience of self-directed health.

She doesn't say this, but I will. The book is a product of a technological epoch, and this isn't the first time this has happened to medicine.

Occultism was done in by the Enlightenment and the printing press, which exponentially increased the rate of knowledge spread, which might have remained largely school-to-school, but resulted in the rise of the scientific method.

Was it later just a coincidence that bad humours and routine phlebotomy finally died out around the introduction of the telegraph?

The telephone then further extended communication down to the doctor-to-doctor level. What worked got traction faster than ever.

The internet (the Information Age) has now made pretty much everything available to everyone. Where eminence-based medicine is still relying on beer-reviewed incomplete or junk science, it now attracts withering attention, both from the investigative critics and the long-suffering care consumers. Anecdotes of success become flash mobs of incipient datasets.

If medical markets can get freer, progress is inevitable. We will be able to choose optimal. Some will make choices that are mistakes, of course, but lack of choice is almost always a mistake.

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Bob Niland [disclosures] [topics]