When I registered on linkedin, I was surprised how very few of my colleagues were on the network. Being a physician, and having a keen interest in research, I began to think about ways that this professional network could help global health move closer to the common goal. That was how my blog was born. In this article, I will explain to the reader, both lay person and healthcare worker how the mission to improve the world’s health has been accomplished.

Healthcare Myths

More often than not, healthcare workers are encouraged during their training to spend 100% of their time, energy and concentration on the job. This could be the patient, the laboratory experiment or the laboratory assay/test. This does not give them a lot of opportunity to meet people and interact with society outside the tense hospital or clinic atmosphere in a professional role. There is what I would call "in-breeding" of ideas and views with the net effect being limited innovation outside the box. Hans Rosling and family have demonstrated that collaborations indeed should be used to advance medical science. The Trendalyzer software speaks for itself. Thus the old myths are debunked, new trends are fast setting in. I am a crusader for using the web for the common good. Mid-career professionals in health-related disciplines may become more productive if they take some time to network with other individuals at distant geographic locations via the WWW.

Weapons of Mass(Man's) Destruction

As we struggle to eliminate the real weapons of mass destruction such as hunger, executive plundering and wars, overlooking networking has cost us so much. Many years have been lost, many milestones never attained and until recently these milestones seemed unattainable. However, when researchers interact more effectively in organized networks and web-based groups, bureaucratic red tape is severed and science can move further towards its desired goal.

The internet has no barriers

Professional networking helps brand the biomedical professional, puts them out for the global community and provides a healthy template for ideas to implant, germinate and bloom. Developing countries vs Westernized countries; language being a limited barrier (especially with tools like google translate and babelfish).East/West alliances, North/South cooperation and trans-cultural amalgamation of ideas that hold the potential to bring humans back to our origins in Gondwanaland. Maybe not but at least make us an actual global village and reduce the inequities in healthcare that we suffer in today's world.

Mission Accomplished indeed

The stage is set, linkedin and other professional networks are growing at an alarming rate. Healthcare professionals are blogging, owning websites and databases are being liberalized. Google has acquired Trendalyzer and has made some other declarations about their intentions towards healthcare. The internet boom was destined to look at healthcare and survival in good detail. According to Marissa Mayer, VP search and User products at Google on the official Google blog a couple of weeks ago, "Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online"

Here it is, the future is here: Mission Accomplished!

This article was originally published on Mcneri's Weblog. It is freely reproducible provided the Creative Commons Licence is adhered to. Visit site