You know that cynical old saying:
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
In other words, knowing the right person provides you strategic advantage in business, social advancement, etc.
In health, it was often true. Knowing who the better doctors were, for instance, in your city might provide you with access to better care.
Enter the Information Age. You now have access to medical information equal to that of your doctor. You now have access to patient discussions about doctors, their practices, their performance records. There is now a depth and breadth of information on health that was never available before.
I’d therefore turn the old saying into the new Health 2.0 version:
It’s not who you know, it’s what you know.
In health, information now reigns supreme, not knowing somebody else who has the right connections.
Positive: Everybody now theoretically has access to an equal amount of information, since you can access information on any topic just as easily as I can.
Negative: It puts more of the burden on you. If you screw up in health, perhaps you didn’t try to get the best information hard enough.
I love this new development, this emergence of empowerment in health. I call it self-directed health , the individual capacity to exert enormous influence over the quality of your healthcare.
This is obviously a work in progress. All the answers and tools for self-directed care, self-empowerment are not yet available, some haven’t even yet been imagined.
But they are coming.