Your own doctor or an online medical knowledge base?

Question

Do it yourself

I live in England. Who doesn’t know, it’s very bad with medicine here (pruflink - www.reform.co.uk/content/4220/research/health/why_... ), the state no longer has money for universal free medicine, but does not want to admit it . Private medicine is also far from ideal, because. she has to compete with the allegedly free NHS, and the doctors are the same, trained to imitate, not cure. Often doctors try not to cure the problem, but to prescribe a prescription. Therefore, it is important to delve into everything yourself, to know what symptoms a disease has, what research needs to be done, how it is treated, what prescriptions to require and understand, whether the doctor issued another dummy-response or the correct treatment began.
Please tell me any correct Russian-language or English-language resources that help the patient get complete information. Unfortunately, the Russian Internet is very littered with “traditional medicine” or commercial centers that have succeeded in search engine optimization more than in their main specialty.
PS Friends, I ask you, do not need holivars and arguments that it is not necessary, only links, otherwise there is not one yet :)

Answer 1

In medicine, the key figure is not the state, not the clinic, but the doctor. A good doctor, in addition to his own capabilities, has a circle of colleagues to whom, if necessary, he transfers the patient. Recheck *diagnosis* on your own - initially a dead number. Moreover, dangerous self-hypnosis of a variety of nonsense. Experienced doctors, by the way, for this reason do not examine themselves, but are given to colleagues. It is easier to double-check treatment regimens in the West than in our country - there are treatment regimens for each diagnosis, they are also protocols. Schemes - precisely schemes - which one is more convenient for you in connection with the possibilities and plans for life, with a proper understanding of the issue and a clear mind, you can discuss with your doctor.
Due to the impossibility of creating a "universal guide to medicine for dummies", such resources do not exist. There are forums and clubs for diabetics, cancer patients, etc. - there, on your problem, you can find valuable grains among the general flow of popular nonsense.
I assume you are still healthy. Search for a good family doctor, by ratings, recommendations, etc. Pay money. And trust. If, God forbid, there is a problem - the same thing, but already to a specialized specialist.

Answer 2

A very authoritative and one of the most professional medical sources is the UpToDate database . However, full professional access to it is paid and quite expensive. There is an incomplete, "patient" one, but the information there is much less detailed. There is also a standalone version (for example, not very fresh for 2007 - on Rutracker .)
A very similar database is ClinicalKey from Elsevier. Also paid and also highly informative.
However, with any use of such information, as rightly noted above, one must be able to interpret medical knowledge. Examples of illiterate interpretation are innumerable.

Answer 3

Look for scans of late Soviet medical textbooks.
I don’t know where, how, but we have young diagnosticians chasing such people like pirates for gold.
In general, self-diagnosis is evil. All the doctors told me this, even about themselves (and the doctor, it seems, should determine what is happening to him), and not a specialist only risks wasting time.
For example, it turned out that the symptoms of pneumothorax are little different from pain in a stretched back. And until everything gets really bad, the hell with two who will guess to go for an x-ray, or even just to the doctors.
Well, to do a full scan of the body for every sneeze ... I don’t think that you have SO much trouble with diagnostic medicine there, a lot of people would have died out from completely harmless sores then.

Answer 4

There is no one resource where reliable and complete information on all medical topics would be collected. For each problem, as a rule, you have to conduct a mini (sometimes taking weeks) research using Google. Search in the history of online consultations of doctors, scientific articles (at the same time, being wary of those where a certain commercial drug is advertised), etc.
In most cases, these sites help:
rusmedserv.com
wikipedia.org (banal, right?)