Good Health Blog

Welcome to edoc.net. Today is our first day online after over a year of design, planning, database building, site reviews and testing. Many thanks to my partner Catherine who has coped with the long nights on the computer, the webste developers at WaratahWeb for their patience and Stephen King (King Design) who did the graphics and 'look'. 
We hope you find the site useful and feel comfortable to recommend it to your family and friends. eDoc.net will develop further over time with our goal being to continue to provide preventative health advice of the highest standard based on only proven scientific medical recommendations.   Prevention is the best cure.

After a day at the office consulting  I come home to a few hours testing of eDoc.net. The testing is to determine compliance with correct practices and that the site flows smoothly. It is also to look for glitches in the reports and database. I am now on the fourth draft and happy that the advice and information is as I would give to any patient that comes into the surgery and says 'What should I be doing this year to keep healthy"
When you see this blog eDoc.net is live so if you have any suggestions, find any problems or would like to assist in any way in improving the service we provide please email us at admin@edoc.net

A thorough review of the US Preventative Services Task Force and The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners 'Guidelines for preventative activities in general practice' is now complete. The recommendations that are evidence based have been used to provide the database behind the free 'age and sex' based results and the more comprehensive health guidelines. Where there has been a variation between the recommendations I have reviewed the referenced literature and determined the more conservative recommendation in most cases as the one to roll with.  The results are a guide for you to talk over with your health professional. They can only be general in nature as they are a result of population studies. Applying them to an individual requires knowing your complete medical history and we hope that you find them a useful start to good preventative health.

Medical specialty groups are often presenting recommendations for routine follow-up and screening within their area. These recommendations are tested, studies relevant to the area reviewed and then the peak Medical Bodies - in the US the Preventative Services Task force and in Australia and New Zealand the College of General practitioners make a recommendation based on the evidence available at the time.
Sifting through the recommendations is a slow task and one that has given me insight into the complex nature of taking a preventative health protocol for a population and working out how to apply it at an individual patient level.  The mens health area for PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) screening is one such area. Prostate cancer is a common problem but the screening tests are not perfect - they detect 'false positives' which can lead to anxiety and unnecessary intervention. On the other hand nobody wants to miss the diagnosis of prostate cancer.  These are the sort of problems all Doctors deal with when doing examinations and ordering investigations. The perfect test has yet to be developed.

The eDoc.net project is underway. After working for months trying to sort out preventative health protocols and screening recommendations into a format you can understand,  it is starting to come together.
One of the challenges of this project is the problem of sorting out what recommendations are actually scientifically proven to be useful.  Although much has been studied, there are areas of conflict and my goal is to keep to the facts. If a recommendation has a proven benefit then it will be included. If the benefit is uncertain for the general public but has specific groups that it is useful for then it will only be included in the comprehensive subscribers area.
I hope you find eDoc.net a useful tool to maintaining good health!

I consult weekdays in a busy international 24 hour medical centre. I have my regular patients and see tourists and locals  on a walk-in emergency basis.  Every day I am astounded by how little preventative health is actually practiced.  Most consults are problem based.  Rarely does a patient walk in well. Given the restraints of time and dollar, the problem is usually all that is dealth with.  It is refreshing to have someone come in and say 'I'm here for a check-up'.  Actually, that is so unusual that I often wonder what prompted the attendance. This is the reason for eDoc.net.  I am trying to make a difference. 

this project started in 2008 with a concept to bring quality health advice direct to the public. After a year of reviewing preventative health recommendations and trying to design a format that is patient friendly and undertandable, eDoc.net is now ready to go onto the web.  Many of the preventative health and screening protocols are designed in 'doctor-speak' and thus make little sense to patients.  I am writing the explanations and getting my 16 year old daughter and local tradesman friends to read them before I post them. If they cannot understand what is needed then I re-work the explanation until it is useful.