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A Practitioner's Comment

Colin P. Kerr, MD

JAMA. 1983;249(15):2027-2028.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

IT IS time for an office practitioner to comment on the rash of recent literature on computers in medicine.^1-4 Indeed, it is appropriate to ask if many office practitioners read these articles with any practical interest. INTERNIST-1, the chest pain protocol, INFERNET, ONCOCIN, and so on are unlikely to be used by most of us. As their respective authors correctly point out, they are at present mainly research tools, and teach us a lot about how medical reasoning works—principally from the computers' shortcomings. Thus, it is comforting to learn that INTERNIST-1 also has difficulty reasoning temporally, anatomically, and pathophysiologically at the same time.

Nonetheless, it is clear that computers are here to stay, and not just at busy emergency rooms or the university hospitals. Because of the incredible price breakthroughs, it is likely that every medical practice will employ or share one within the next few years. The computer . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Winters Medical Center, Winters, Calif.

Footnotes
Reprints not available.

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