News Report #2

Medpedia: A Collaborative Encyclopedia for Health Care
The New York Times
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/medpedia-a-collaborative-encyclopedia-for-health-care/?em

Medpedia is a new website much like Wikipedia except purely for the medical purpose. Unlike the other online encyclopedias, there will be some limitations to Medpedia. The only people allowed to write and edit on the site will be certified professionals who will also have their own page with information about themselves and their credibility. Although there are other sites on the web such as Webmd.com, the creator of the site, James Currier, hopes to create the most extensive site on the web of medical information which would include an area for other patients to share their treatment stories as well as talk directly with the physicians who edited the site. The site has already had a great deal of support from the medical community with large medical schools such as Harvard and Berkeley contributing as much as 7,000 pages. Eventually, the creator of the site hopes that he can create an extensive variety of information about anything in the medical field along with how to prepare for surgeries, questions that should be asked to their doctors, the average overall cost, along with multimedia. Along with all that, eventually, Currier hopes to be a place where doctors can publish journals along with any other piece of information the physician has to offer.
In my opinion, this is a great idea. It is very important to have as much information as possible about the medical field available to everyone. Being accessible to all physicians, it will enable them to put a wider variety of diseases or disorders that are somewhat less common and very hard to find information about. It is also good to know that the only people publishing this will be professionals. Hopefully the site will take off and we will have all the information we could every imagine from the medical field.