2002

The scene: British Columbia today. A cast of thousands, discussing the state of health care and medical practice in the province.

Character #1: “Doctors are overpaid crybabies. All they want is more money and more respect. They should be on salary like any public servant.”

Character #2: “My parents really sacrificed for me to go to medical school. I’m proud of where I came from and what I do, and I’m happy that I made them proud too.”

I would like to express my appreciation for all of the hard work that the BCMA has put into the recent arbitration process and hence the subsequent award recommended. I would, however, implore that this settlement be used more wisely and with the future of health care in mind.

We would like to clarify an apparent misconception that the Hereditary Cancer Program is no longer operational. We are still accepting referrals for families at high risk of breast and ovarian cancer, hereditary colon cancer, and other cancer syndromes including medullary thyroid cancer, retinoblastoma, Li Fraumeni, and Von Hippel Lindau.

Recently, I found myself mired in a funk of epic proportions. Every day there seemed to be one enormous crisis after another, so by the end of most recent weeks I felt like what I imagine a public relations consultant hired to improve the image of the Taliban in New York City would feel like. First, virtually no one outside of your very small sphere of influence is terribly interested in helping, and second, if you broadcast the elements of your problems too loudly or too frequently, you stimulate total disinterest.

Just how many articles that BC doctors want to read are available in electronic format via the Internet? Are we closer to the dream of a collection entirely online, or is electronic publishing suffering under the same illusions that led to the nightmare of the dot.com meltdown? To answer these questions, I looked online for all of the 44 articles in the February issue of Cites & Bytes, first when the issue came out, then 2 weeks later. Had you tried to find the full text, you would have found: