There's a joke that we tell in my family to irritate my physician father.
A doctor dies and goes to heaven. When he arrives at the Pearly Gates in his scrubs, he strides up to the front of the queue and demands to be let in because he, a doctor, clearly deserves special treatment. After all, he's been through medical school. He can save lives. He is, in short, awesome. St Peter tells him no and sends him to the back of the queue.
Moments later, another dead guy, also wearing surgical scrubs, walks to the front and the gates swing open for him. The first doctor asks why he let the other one in and not him. St Peter responds: "Oh, that's God. He thinks he's a doctor."
It is a terrible generalisation, but MDs have historically tended to think that they have all the answers. And when it comes to matters of the heart, lungs, liver, pancreas and other cuts of the human corpus, they certainly know more than the average Joe or Jane.
However, a public increasingly informed about medical options and personal wellbeing is beginning to question the medicine man's authority, thanks to the trove of health-related content online. Anything you want to know about any symptom is not only available in triplicate (often with conflicting advice), but that information is often accompanied by prognoses, treatments and social support networks. You can now effectively bypass the doctor's surgery completely by self-diagnosing and self-medicating. The web is having a profound effect on how we understand and how we do health.
Read the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/untangling-the-web-with-aleks-krotoski