Doctor [can't] know best

People with multiple health problems (multimorbidity) are largely overlooked both in medical research and in the nation’s clinics and hospitals. The default position is to treat complicated patients as collections of malfunctioning body parts rather than as whole human beings.

As social networks let us keep an albeit shallow but consistent connection with those as various degrees of closeness to us, why wouldn't an physician-only social network (EMR bolt-on?) go a long way towards giving doctors the holistic view of their increasingly complex patients' cases?

Step up Facebook.

“Good luck and a lot of sleuthing on my part have given me doctors whom I trust and who are mostly aware of interactions among the drugs they prescribe, but what’s missing is someone who can look at the big picture and see my health as a whole"

“That falls to me alone, with the help of my very wise wife and frequent visits to reliable Web sites. As our population ages, we need some kind of overseer to juggle all the diagnoses and prescriptions and look for conflicts and duplications. This would also help to counteract the notion in many people’s minds that the doctor knows best — because often the doctor doesn’t.”

• Two-thirds of people over age 65, and almost three-quarters of people over 80, have multiple chronic health conditions.
• 68 percent of Medicare spending goes to people who have five or more chronic diseases.

Full article here