Are Physicians Starting To Wiki a Diagnosis?

The BMJ article on Googling for a diagnosis published last year brought attention to the use of the internet to help make the correct diagnosis. We have also noticed a trend that we have seen on AskDrWiki, which is use of the word "wiki" that accompanies a medical search query. We have had over 1400 queries this year in which a medical term was linked with the word wiki.

Such as "cardiac index wiki", "empiric trial wiki", "amyloidosis wiki", or "captopril wiki". Clearly medical students, nurses, and physicians are not only Googling for a diagnosis but they are also directing their search toward a wiki.

We hope that we can help make another tool for the physicians bag that can help diagnose difficult cases.

AskDrWiki and RadsWiki Collaborate

We are very excited about our new collaboration with Radswiki. One of the most powerful features of a wiki comes from the ability to wiki link to other articles in the wiki. With the growing list of medical wikis this benefit may be lost. We hope that we can continue to collaborate with other wikis and build a true quality multi specialty medical wiki. We recognize the need for subspecialty wikis, like Radswiki, just as there are subspecialty text books, but we hope that other subspecialty wikis will also work with us to establish an integrated medical wiki.