More on OA for doctors and patients

Jonathan Eisen, Open Access Rant: How Does Your Doctor Learn About the Newest Medical Findings?? The Tree of Life, August 13, 2006.  Excerpt:

...[Here] is one of the biggest problems in modern medicine. Even if you have a really hard working doctor who is willing to read the latest papers, they may not be able to. This is because even though most of the medical studies were paid for by the government in some way, they are not freely available for the doctors to read because they are published in journals that charge exceptionally high prices for subscriptions. Doctors in large institutions probably have good access to this information. But doctors in small groups may not. Imagine if congress passed laws but lawyers was not allowed to read them without paying a fee to someone. The system is really absurd.

I got thinking about this when re-reading Lance Armstrong's autobiography "It's Not about the Bike." In the book, Armstrong describes how when he had testicular cancer he had a friend who was a doctor bring him the latest studies on this type of cancer and he read all of them. Well, this only was possible because his friend must have had access to all the publications through a university or very large medical group. Wouldn't it have been better if Armstrong could have just gotten the studies himself, given that most were paid for by the US Government in the first place? Well, if people doing medical researhc published their finding in Open Access journals, then anyone could read the articles, from doctors, to patients, to family members, to journalists. We would all benefit if this was done.