by Shannon Brownlee Sorry about the two-day absence, folks. One commenter on an earlier post about evidence-based medicine opined that patients should be able to direct their own care because everybody in America has access to the Internet. I’m here to tell you that that’s not always the case. The DSL line out here on the coast of Oregon decided to go out and we’ve been having sketchy service for a couple of days. Here’s an excerpt from something sent to me by a friend who is a physician's assistant. It's from a book by Archie Cochrane, a Scottish (??) physician who was instrumental in the founding of the evidence-based medicine movement. He was also a deeply compassionate doctor. As a German POW during WW II, Cochrane was put in charge of the care of 20,000 prisoners for six months at Salonika. he wrote, "The diet was about 600 calories a day and we all had diarrhoea. In addition we had severe epidemics of typhoid, diphtheria, infections, jaundice, and sand-fly fever, with more than 300 cases of 'pitting oedema above the knee'. To cope with this we had a ramshackle hospital, some aspirin, some antacid, and some skin antiseptic." He lost only four diphtheria patients in his six months as chief medical officer,
