If you are one of those who get caught up with work and other preoccupations and hardly find time to see a doctor even when your body is screaming for attention, you may not need to worry anymore. Electronic medicine is here to resolve most of your concerns.
According to an article published in January 2009 by Elizabeth Cohen, a senior CNN medical correspondent, lots of people are already using various e-medicine channels to consult with Medical Doctors, thereby avoiding the face-to-face visit.
There are many ways in which technology has modified the way we live. The sectors abound – commerce, letter-writing, banking, and medical care. At a lower level, I myself have already been using the least complicated of the e-medicine techniques. Usually when I get symptoms of malaria, I would do a telephone consultation with my doctor. After explaining the symptoms, he will prescribe the medicine I should take. Sometimes the consultation is done just by sending him a short text message, or an email. The downside is that you may need to know the intensity of the malaria through a lab test (which sometimes is not excluded) in order for the doctor to know which drug to prescribe.
According to the above-mentioned article courtesy CNN.com, there are forthcoming more advanced methods of doing e-medicine, with the use of multimedia facilities like cameras to permit the doctor actually see the object of the consultation. These include:
- Virtual clinics (where patients can use machines incorporated with cameras installed in supermarkets and department stores for a fee);
- Ask-a-Doctor websites (where there are specialists on hand to answer patients’ questions for a fee);
- Online house calls whereby users can either use video chats, text or instant messaging sessions for a fee;
- Twittering doctors (here, doctors use social networking sites (like Twitter) to get additional help when faced with new symptoms they are not familiar with.
In spite of the advantages brought about by e-medicine, there are however some cases where a visit to the doctor cannot be avoided. E-medicine may very well save us time and sometimes money but it complements rather than replaces seeing a doctor in person.
It is also worth noting that a majority of these techniques are yet to become a reality in developing countries.
1 comment:
I find this very interesting as I wonder at times what this rather fast paced world is coming into. Good to know there are options open to the fastest runners! I would rather try this than self-prescribe.
Thank you, P
Post a Comment