Discussion Groups
A popular means of professional communication on the Internet
is known as a discussion group. In essence, groups of interested people provide
their e-mail addresses to a central site known as a host or listserver, thereby creating
a list of members or recipients. A member of that list may then send an e-mail message
to the central host, which in turn rebroadcasts the message to all members on the
list. The message traffic on these lists may be very light or dozens of messages
per day. Many active discussion groups provide a once-per-day digest service as
an alternative to receiving a daily swarm of individual messages. The content of
the messages ranges from seeking and rendering clinical advice, to discussion of
cases, to even frank commercial "spam." Some listservers are "moderated," which
means that the person owning the list reviews each incoming message for appropriateness
before rebroadcasting it. The largest anesthesia-related discussion Group at present
is the GASNet Anesthesiology Discussion Group (http://gasnet.med.yale.edu/anesthesiology/index.php).
A list of over 50 anesthesia-related groups with contact addresses can be obtained
at http://www.eur.nl/cgi-bin/wrt4.pl.
An Internet service known as USENET provides an alternative variant
of the discussion group. Instead of using e-mail to communicate with a fixed list
of subscribers, USENET follows a public bulletin board model. USENET provides for
topical bulletin boards, also known as newsgroups, to which anyone may read or post
messages. At present, USENET contains over 50,000 separate newsgroups, although
at the moment no publicly accessible group is related specifically to the practice
of anesthesia or critical care. Newsgroups are named to place themselves within
a subject hierarchy. For example, "comp.sys.mac.digest" is a newsgroup within the
root group concerning computers (comp) related to Macintosh computers (.sys.mac)
that specifically contains summaries of news, commentary, and new file postings (.digest).
Another example is "rec.auto.bmw," which is a newsgroup where hobbyists and enthusiasts
(rec = recreation) discuss the minutiae of BMW automobiles. Topics of general medical
interest may be found within the sci.med (medical sciences) hierarchy, for example,
sci.med, sci.med.cardiology, sci.med.pharmacy, sci.med.informantics. Basic neuroscience
is also covered in the bionet.neurosci group. The uneven quality of information
within discussion groups and newsgroups requires a philosophy of caveat
lector on the part of their users.
The power as well as failing of the Internet is that it provides
an accessible medium where true freedom of the press is the rule. Medical professionals
and health care consumers may enjoy the adventure of surfing the web as much as anyone,
but when seeking reliable medical information, it is prudent to exercise judgment
and rely on sources of known provenance.
